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Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Practice Development Playbook
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About this Playbook This playbook is intended for the business and technical leadership for new and existing Microsoft partners focused on implementing Microsoft Teams (Teams) or modernizing legacy applications and bringing them into Teams. Objectives How this playbook was made
The goal of this playbook is to help partners understand This playbook is part of a series of guidance written by the growth opportunity that Microsoft Teams (Teams) Microsoft Partner Opsgility, in conjunction with the provides so that they can accelerate or optimize their Microsoft One Commercial Partner group. Teams-focused practice. This playbook will offer guidance Content in this playbook is based on in-depth interviews and best practices on selling and deploying Teams as well with 8 Teams partners, specially selected for their depth of as extending Teams with custom solutions. expertise and proven track record in delivering successful For the business side, this playbook provides an Teams projects. understanding of the strategies partners can take to build To validate the guidance provided in this playbook, we a Teams practice, including which areas of Teams to focus worked with MDC Research to conduct a survey of global on, how to cross sell leveraging Teams, and how to build a partners, with responses from 387 partners currently technical team. offering Teams. In this survey, we gathered insights on a For the technical side, this playbook provides detailed range of topics, including how partners hire, compensate guidance on how to manage Teams and how to approach and train resources; their business model, revenue and governance. It also provides guidance on various add-ons profitability; what practices and services they offer; and to Teams and the areas of Teams that can be customized what skillsets they have in place to support their offers. and extended for customers. The results of this survey are provided in-line with the guidance found within this playbook
CONTRIBUTING PARTNERS
Adopt and Embrace Cognizant IT Improvement
Avanade Empired NTT Data
Cobweb / Vuzion Engage2
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Using the playbook effectively
Quickly read through the playbook to become familiar with the layout and content. Each section includes an executive summary and key actions for that specific topic. Review these summaries first to decide which areas to focus on. Go over the content several times, if needed, then share within the team.
TO GET THE MOST VALUE OUT OF THIS PLAYBOOK: Get teams together and discuss which pieces of the strategy each person is responsible for. Share the playbook with sales, marketing, support, technical, and managed services teams. Leverage the resources available from Microsoft to help maximize profitability. Share feedback on how to improve this and other playbooks by emailing [email protected].
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Table of Contents About this Playbook ...... 2 Operationalize ...... 123 Digital Transformation ...... 5 Executive Summary ...... 124 The Teamwork Opportunity ...... 6 Teamwork Assessment ...... 125 Partner Practice Development Framework ...... 7 Implement a Solution Delivery Process...... 127 Define Your Strategy ...... 8 Implement Intellectual Property Offerings ...... 129 Executive Summary ...... 9 Microsoft Licensing Options ...... 130 Define Your Practice Focus ...... 10 Create Your Presales Environment...... 131 Understanding the Teams Practice ...... 12 Key Contracts and Practice Tools ...... 133 Teams Sales Formula ...... 23 Use CRM to Grow Your Business ...... 134 Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities ...... 25 Define Customer Support Program & Process ...... 135 Firstline Workers Opportunity ...... 27 Get Co-Sell Ready ...... 137 Define Your Service and Solution Offering ...... 32 Support Options from Microsoft ...... 138 Project Services ...... 34 Support Tracking ...... 140 Managed Services ...... 36 Go to Market and Close Deals ...... 141 Reusable IP ...... 39 Executive Summary ...... 142 Developing Teams Offerings ...... 40 Marketing Infrastructure ...... 143 Hire & Train ...... 95 Sales Infrastructure ...... 145 Executive Summary ...... 96 Go-to-Market and Close Deals Guide ...... 147 Hire, Build, and Train Your Team ...... 98 Optimize & Grow ...... 148 Recruiting Resources ...... 102 Executive Summary ...... 149 Job Descriptions ...... 103 Guide: Optimize and Grow ...... 150 Training Resources ...... 118 Playbook Summary ...... 151 Competencies and Certifications ...... 120 Guide: Hire and Train ...... 122
March 2020
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Digital Transformation
As organizations transform their businesses with cloud technologies, they quickly find new and better methods of collaboration and customer engagement, as well as more effective ways to measure productivity and sales effectiveness.
Source: Developing a Teamwork Adoption and Change Management Practice Partner Guide Today’s workforce is more mobile, social, and global, and the devices and digital tools they use to get their work done reflect those changes. But people also have different backgrounds in technology and different expectations about their communication and collaboration activities, adding to the diversity of devices and tools and management complexity. Organizations are finding tremendous value in bringing new workstyles and customer touchpoints together into a cohesive collaboration platform. And partners who combine their knowledge of customer business processes with the skills to help make the needed technology and cultural shifts are delivering that value leveraging modern communication and collaboration offerings based on Teams.
Teams can help partners move forward across all four pillars of digital transformation to:
1. Empower employees by delivering self-serve, efficient information search and sharing, employee engagement measurement, and learning and development activities. 2. Engage better with customers by enabling timely feedback loops, customer support, sales associate productivity measurement, and much more. 3. Optimize operations with effective execution of business processes, delivery management, and live tracking of in- flight products or services. 4. Transform products along with their workforce, ranging from project management to engineering workflows, through to managing service incidents and design collaboration.
FURTHER READING → Microsoft Digital Transformation eBook Series
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The Teamwork Opportunity Modern collaboration platforms such as Teams allow colleagues to connect with each other and their customers anywhere, on any device via chat or audio and video calls and meetings, sharing and collaborating on documents and workflows securely in real time.
More effective communications improve business outcomes and reduce telephony costs, while the integrated collaboration capabilities provide better uptime, performance, scalability, security and compliance. A Teams practice can highlight a partner’s expertise with adoption and change management services, helping customers take full advantage of tools and to find more productive ways of working. The Teams approach to collaboration helps employees become more receptive to change and increases employee satisfaction. This connected collaboration experience represents the largest and fastest expanding Microsoft 365 opportunity for partners across all four delivery areas: deployment, advisory and adoption services, business solutions, and managed services.
Source: The Microsoft Teams Partner Guide
WHY MICROSOFT As part of Office 365 and Microsoft 365, Teams delivers an integrated and comprehensive communications, collaboration, and workflow platform. To understand more about Microsoft’s differentiated value proposition, see www.whymicrosoft.com for specific guidance on the advantages of Teams over Slack and why Skype for Business customers should upgrade to Teams rather than switch to a third-party offering.
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Partner Practice Development Framework The partner practice development framework defines how to take a practice from concept to growth. It is the foundation of this playbook, and each phase of the framework is covered in a dedicated chapter.
aka.ms/practiceplaybooks ABOUT THIS PLAYBOOK PAGE 8 Microsoft Partner Define Your Strategy
Network Define Your Strategy Define Your Strategy
Microsoft Teams
aka.ms/practiceplaybooks
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Executive Summary
Now that everyone understands the opportunities of If partners are not yet a Microsoft partner, we will give a building a practice focused on modern teamwork, it is tour of the Microsoft Partner Network, the programs to time to build a strategy and determine which parts of leverage to grow a practice, how to earn competencies Teams an organization will pursue. that yield additional benefits, and how to maximize the benefits from the program. We begin by providing an overview of the areas of expertise within a teamwork practice: deployment, voice We will follow that up with an overview of potential calling and virtual meetings, education and user adoption, service offerings and offer tips for how to identify and custom and ISV solutions. An organizations practice potential customers to help partners build their practice. may have expertise in all these areas, just one of these We will conclude this section with how partners can areas, or any combination. For each opportunity, we support their customers. This includes guides on how to provide details about the business nature of the support customers, support offerings from Microsoft opportunity and the key areas leveraged in delivering related to a practice, and the support-related benefits solutions that capitalize on the opportunity. from establishing competencies within the Microsoft Next, we will guide everyone through the process of Partner Network. defining their offer and its value proposition to customers. Simply stated, this is what partners will sell and why customers will want to buy it.
Top 4 things to do Understand the Teams opportunity
Define a business strategy. Here Identify common customer collaboration scenarios are the top 4 things partners should absolutely do when Define a service and solution offering defining a Teams strategy. Define a pricing strategy
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Define Your Practice Focus With a Teams practice partners can enable customers to accelerate their business in new ways through open communication, on any device, from anywhere, at any time.
DEPLOYMENT, SECURITY, GOVERNANCE EDUCATION AND USER ADOPTION
Before customers can take advantage of Teams, Leverage proven adoption and change partners will have to deploy it. Make the most of the management (ACM) methodologies to drive Teams opportunity by deploying Teams in a manner increased adoption, enabling customers to bring that is consistent with customers‘ needs for security, new business use cases to life and maximize the data retention, compliance, and more. value of their Teams investment.
VOICE CALLING AND VIRTUAL MEETINGS CUSTOM AND ISV SOLUTIONS
Make the most of the Microsoft 365 opportunity by Teams is the universal hub for teamwork, allowing combining and expanding communications and the customization and extension of the workspace collaboration practices with Teams’ calling and with third-party apps, processes, and devices in meetings offerings. Enhance offerings by including addition to building SaaS or custom apps on top of Teams devices for users and meeting rooms. Teams.
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SURVEY DATA Of all survey respondents, one in five are ahead of the curve and already offer Teams services, and a similar number are already evaluating the Teams opportunity. Of those already offering Teams, planning and deployment services were the most common offering, and custom solutions the least common.
Technology and financial sector customers are the top revenue sources for Teams partners, with technology companies generating most revenue.
Source: Microsoft Teams Playbook Study, MDC Research, November 2019 aka.ms/ practiceplaybooks DEFINE YOUR STRATEGY PAGE 12
Understanding the Teams Practice Teams is a hub for teamwork, which brings together everything a team needs: chat and threaded conversations, meetings & video conferencing, Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) calling, content collaboration with the power of Office 365 applications, and the ability to create and integrate apps and workflows that businesses rely on.
The Deployment, Security, and Governance Opportunity
As partners consider where they will focus their practice, almost all practices will have an opportunity to deploy Teams. Some examples include device implementation, offering configuration and management services to help customers better secure and govern their Teams environment as well as surrounding workloads such as Exchange and SharePoint. But a practice does not end with planning and deployment. Deployment is an on-ramp to architecture and security planning along with services such as migration from existing collaboration solutions to Microsoft 365. There are multiple services partners can offer as a part of a practice, including:
PROJECT SERVICES
Build strategy and roadmap assessment for Teams Security and compliance evaluation and configuration
Deployment of Teams Project management
Network and Active Directory readiness assessment
These types of services build the foundation of a practice and lead to stronger relationships with customers. As a follow on, partners can continue to expand their practice into pull-through project services such as change management or specialized industry-specfic offers. Partners will also find that post-deployment managed services become an opportunity to not only forge a lasting relationship with customers, but also become an integral part of their business. Examples of managed services include:
MANAGED SERVICES
Modular technical and end-user support End-to-end network quality monitoring
On-demand content creation customization Proactive quality management and administration
Ongoing adoption engagements Repeatable tools for simplified admin and front-end access
IT service management processes Organizational change management and reporting
Phone system with direct routing as service Adoption measurement and organizational analytics
Voice Calling and Virtual Meetings, monitoring and Microsoft 365 cross-workload offering (Security, Compliance, optimization Modern Desktop)
Devices as a Service (DaaS)
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SURVEY DATA Many partners are still at an early stage of delivering Teams services, as is reflected in the median figures below. Note the darker band in each chart showing the larger volumes and revenues achieved by more established Teams practices. 85% of Teams partners surveyed offer planning and deployment services, averaging almost $150k/year in revenue over the past 12 months, with roughly $130k/year in follow-on revenue for additional services.
Top planning and deployment services offered include core onboarding to Office 365/Microsoft 365, and configuration and implementation of OneDrive for Business; 9 in 10 Teams partners provide ongoing planning and deployment management services.
Source: Microsoft Teams Playbook Study, MDC Research, November 2019
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The Education and User Adoption Opportunity
Deploying Teams is just the beginning. To help customers realize their desired business outcomes and return on their Microsoft 365 teamwork investments, it’s critical for partners to help them ensure not only that users adopt new services, but also that they embrace those services and use them as part of their natural rhythm of work. Recent studies show that organizations are six times more likely to meet or exceed business objectives when effective change management is in place. (Source: Prosci, Best Practices in Change Management, 2018) Offering adoption and change management (ACM) services for Microsoft 365 – and more specifically Teams – enables partners to create value for customers by educating and motivating users to take full advantage of best-in-class productivity and collaboration tools that lead to new ways of working. The overall market for change management related to Microsoft technologies for 2019 is US$9.5 billion, growing 7 percent annually. (Source: IDC, A commissioned study of ACM services on Microsoft technologies, 2018) In addition, a Forrester Total Economic Impact study that measured partners’ profitability in different business models found that partners with adoption and change management practices grew their businesses by 10 percent year over year.
CUSTOMER BENEFITS Customers benefit from ACM services in multiple ways. By focusing on employee-centric outcomes, partners will bring more than a set of products to your customers – they will bring them a different, more efficient way of working.
Improve the likelihood of a Help employees become more Drive employee-centric Make change a part of your successful deployment by receptive to change, increasing outcomes, where people are the customer’s culture, supporting reinforcing the use of Teams and usage of Teams and revenue engine that drives change, with their unique challenges and ensuring it meets the needs not opportunity. Teams enabling that change. delivering business outcomes. just the business, but also the people who make it run. aka.ms/practiceplaybooks DEFINE YOUR STRATEGY PAGE 15
SURVEY DATA 71% of Teams partners surveyed offer adoption and change management services, averaging over $140k/year in revenue over the past 12 months, and another $130k/year in follow-on revenue for additional services.
Technical deployment and change management are offered in balance, and very few work in partnership with other companies to deliver these services.
Source: Microsoft Teams Playbook Study, MDC Research, November 2019
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The Voice Calling and Virtual Meetings Opportunity
Teams delivers immersive experiences that can help customers work more efficiently across their organization and stay connected wherever they are, on any device. They can make the most of this opportunity by offering integrated messaging, calling, and meeting solutions built on Teams. The opportunity surrounding calling and meetings is grounded in Teams being the hub for teamwork for customers through the implementation of meetings, calling, and devices. There is an increasing opportunity to integrate meeting services, meeting rooms and calling into a unified collaboration and communication solution for enterprise customers. In addition, by migrating existing Skype for Business accounts to Teams, partners can create significant additional opportunities, such as custom solutions. Microsoft has published additional guidance on building a Calling and Meetings Practice. This includes information on the value proposition, partner opportunity, practice building and go-to-market planning.
VOICE CALLING Deepen customer engagements and simplify communication and collaboration for customers by adding PSTN calling capabilities in Office 365 and Teams. Phone System, when paired with Calling Plan and/or Direct Routing, provides a rich cloud-based calling experience through Teams for Office 365 users, globally.
VIRTUAL MEETINGS Teams meetings deliver a rich, high-definition audio and video experience that enable users to interact and collaborate easily, regardless of the device or network. Whether it’s one-on-one video calls on mobile and desktop devices, conference meetings held across boardrooms all over the world, or global live events delivered to thousands of people, Teams meetings provides a seamless, scalable, and secure experience for users. And, because Teams supports a range of best-in-class devices, partners can offer customers more immersive experiences to improve collaboration across teams.
DEVICES For every work experience, and space and working style, there is a Teams device to choose from. The Teams user interface delivers seamless Teams experiences across a variety of certified devices. In addition, Teams Rooms brings a modern, easy-to- use, and consistent experience to meeting spaces with one touch join and a rich set of artificial intelligence-enabled (AI- enabled) capabilities.
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CUSTOMER BENEFITS Forrester Research recently completed a Total Economic Impact study of Microsoft 365 Cloud Voice adoption. The financial business case for Cloud Voice was compelling: Forrester concluded that Cloud Voice has the following three-year financial impact: $9.5M in benefits versus costs of $2.6M, resulting in a net present value (NPV) of $6.9M and an ROI of 261%.
In addition, Forrester identified the following benefits of Cloud Voice over the previous telephony system: • Better voice communication saves time, increases for example through reduced international and collaboration, and improves mobility. mobile roaming call charges. • More effective voice communication as part of an • Cloud Voice improves security and compliance. integrated collaboration solution improves • Cloud Voice provides better uptime, business outcomes, such as increased revenues performance, and scalability than the previous and decreased time-to-market. solutions. • Eliminating previous telephony solutions partially • Cloud Voice, as part of Teams, improves or fully offsets the cost of Cloud Voice. employee satisfaction, with the number of • Individual user telephony costs are also reduced, employees reporting as ‘very happy’ increasing from 15% to 85%.
CONNECT MORE EFFICIENT COMPREHENSIVE A STRONG EVERYWHERE MEETINGS ECOSYSTEM FOUNDATION
A single intelligent An intelligent backend delivers Supported by a best-in-class Teams is built for modern communications and adaptive and immersive meeting ecosystem of partners with communications that ensure collaboration experience for experiences that drive solutions ranging from devices optimal audio and video chat, calling, and meetings with efficiencies by providing to third-party integration— experiences regardless of device a portfolio of purpose-built transparent access to extending the value and or network. Organizations and devices to choose from. information and contextual capabilities of Teams for Calling users can work with confidence— insights drawn from usage and Meetings. on a platform designed to deliver patterns. security, control, and compliance.
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SURVEY DATA 78% of Teams partners surveyed offer calling and meeting services, averaging just over $75k/year in revenue over the past 12 months, and nearly $69k/year in follow-on revenue for additional services.
A wide range of meeting and calling services are offered, with those involving physical sites and hardware installation or configuration being the least common.
Source: Microsoft Teams Playbook Study, MDC Research, November 2019
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The Custom and ISV Solutions Opportunity
A recent Forrester Total Economic Impact study measuring partner profitability under different business models found that partner business solution practices have grown 17 percent year over year. The rapid increase in Teams users and new sets of Teams platform capabilities have opened enormous opportunities for partners to customize and extend the Teams platform to build tailored Teams workspaces to meet customer needs. Each team has its own set of personas, applications, and workflows, such as sales dashboards, employee onboarding, and process workflows. Key to success is understanding the customer’s specific needs and desired business outcomes and engaging with customers to learn about their requirements unlocks this untapped opportunity. The opportunities within Teams continues to expand with the rapid growth of Teams as a product. Begin with a focus on solving customer problems.
OPPORTUNITY ONE: SOLVING CUSTOMER CHALLENGES Every team has unique needs. Teams is the canvas to create innovative new solutions that are tailored to address those needs and help customers drive their desired business outcomes. Develop custom solutions to bring together the applications and services customers are familiar with, along with their own line-of-business apps, into one Teams hub.
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OPPORTUNITY TWO: CUSTOMIZE AND EXTEND While every team is unique, each consistently needs a variety of apps and tools for productivity. Teams is the universal hub for teamwork that infuses them together, allowing the customization and extension of workspace with third-party apps, processes, and devices. Teams offers an extensible platform that allows for a personalized experience in order to get work done better, more efficiently, and more transparently. The workspace itself is improved by pinning important files, apps or dashboard at the top of each channel for easy reference. Infusing Teams with the applications used every day allows users to better leverage the apps and tools they love—giving them access to the information they need right in the context of Teams. By connecting a customer’s workplace tools into one single hub, users can simplify processes and accelerate decision-making. This provides an excellent opportunity for partners to assist and build Teams applications to create a tailored Team workspace and bring all the applications into a unified experience for the customer. The first part of customizing and extending Teams might be as simple as bringing together all familiar Microsoft Office applications, reducing context switching and creating conversations around content. The second part of this infusion of tools is bringing together all the other apps and services necessary for everyday productivity. This is where partners can optimize value to a customer. The Teams store currently has more than 400 partner applications and integrations available, and this continues to grow. Teams also provides the ability to extend the experience to leverage the apps and services that an organization has built and provide employees the line-of-business applications they need. Imagine a day where all an organization’s applications not only show up in one single user interface, but also work better together, allowing users to stay in the flow of their work. Partners can make this vision become a reality, by taking customer applications and integrating them into a modern workplace.
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OPPORTUNITY THREE: INCREASE PARTNER PROFITABILITY In addition to the opportunity that the tools and ideas with Teams provides to partners and customers, the continuous innovation of the Teams product in the modern workplace not only provides a better experience for customers, but also growing partner opportunities. A Forrester Research study commissioned by Microsoft studied partner opportunities across the Microsoft 365 offerings and revealed that partners can make up to $45 per user per month if offering solutions in the areas of security, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), teamwork, and modern desktop. Teams is central to this offering. Specifically, there are also significant growth opportunities in advisory and adoption services, business solutions, and managed services. Business solutions were reported as the area with the most growth year over year and will continue to grow as companies centralize their work in Teams.
Source: Developing a Teamwork Adoption and Change Management Practice Partner Guide
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OPPORTUNITY FOUR: INDUSTRIES AND HORIZONTALS Focusing on a specific industry or horizontal enables partners to envision with customers, understand their business process and teamwork needs, and connect Teams to the tools and services they use every day to help them optimize the value of Teams.
OPPORTUNITY FIVE: MICROSOFT APPSOURCE AND TEAMS APP STORE Reach a broader audience by publishing to the Microsoft AppSource or Teams app store. Adapting, packaging, and publishing repeatable intellectual property (IP) solutions to Microsoft AppSource, increases the potential for adoption and leverage the growth of Teams. Publishing to Microsoft AppSource also makes solutions available in the Teams store and discoverable by a broad audience of business and end users using productivity tools. Learn best practices for apps for Teams and how to package, test, and publish solutions to Microsoft AppSource through the Building Apps for Microsoft Teams guidebook and the Learn How to Build Microsoft Teams Apps webinar.
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Teams Sales Formula The sales motion for Teams starts with understanding customers’ needs for digital transformation. As customers begin to use Microsoft 365 and the Office 365 productivity suite, partners can educate them on the value of the products they already have as they deploy Teams and increase adoption.
Teams adoption is accelerating for many reasons, including macro trends that will benefit partners as a Microsoft partner. For example, companies are accelerating their pace of digital transformation in order to improve business outcomes and increase internal and external collaboration. In a 2018 research report, Forrester predicted that: “Collaboration will emerge as an anchor technology for digital transformation. Collaboration helps workers share information, coordinate projects, discuss best practices, and build communities within and across the enterprise.” Furthermore, a Forrester survey published in the same year found that 82% of global technology decision makers have already begun or will begin enterprise collaboration initiatives in the next 12 months. Taken together, increased digital transformation and collaboration initiatives translate into more Teams opportunities for partners. Example scenarios of how to improve collaboration using SHARE A VISION FOR HOW CUSTOMERS FACE Microsoft 365 can be found in the Microsoft 365 THOSE CHALLENGES HEAD-ON Productivity Library. Teams empowers users to “collaborate with deeply integrated Office 365 apps.” Organizations have provided EDUCATE THE CUSTOMER ON TEAMS AS A PART many examples of improved collaboration, freeing up OF THE OFFICE 365 PRODUCTIVITY SUITE time for information and first line workers to focus on Teams leads to significant time savings in collaboration higher-value activities. Teams also gives users better activities for both Information and first line workers by access to people and resources to make smarter and faster adding Teams to an existing Microsoft 365 decisions. Improved collaboration also provides benefits implementation. This includes time saved on coauthoring around increasing employee satisfaction, helping in cross- and version control and the time spent seeking out the generational understanding, and creating a common right information and colleagues. Companies also culture. reported a reduction in emails sent because users could aka.ms/practiceplaybooks DEFINE YOUR STRATEGY PAGE 24
request and share information in the Teams focused for partners to get the latest sales tools, deliver the best workspace using conversation threads. demos, and have value-based conversations with customers. Microsoft continues to work with partners, Teams improves worker decision making by allowing champion communities, and Microsoft product marketing them to quickly make contact, communicate with fellow managers to consolidate multiple platforms, repositories, employees, and review all the information they need to and content and demo experiences across these sites to make decisions more efficiently. deliver the best experiences and content for partners. Additionally, Teams improves employee satisfaction and Being a Microsoft partner provides access to all the better connected them to the organization. Younger resources within the transform.microsoft.com site that will workers specifically expect to have the same modern IT help in demonstrating the value of Teams to customers: experiences in the workplace that they experience in their personal lives. All of this can reduce employee turnover • Customer Content Assembler – Deliver high-quality and the associated costs to find and onboard content and the latest marketing-approved replacements. Furthermore, the cost to train new hires is messaging, in a consistent format. reduced because they do not need to be trained on • Customer Digital Experiences – Find demos, Customer multiple solutions. Immersion Experience (CIE), and labs. • Return on Investment – Use real customer data to MICROSOFT 365 BUSINESS VALUE PROGRAM show return on investment with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Business Value Programs and Office 365. transform.microsoft.com have long been go-to locations • Workshops and Assessments – Assess customer’s current state to recommend the best course of action.
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Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities Teams can be used to both upsell and cross sell across Microsoft 365 and the Office 365 productivity suite. As the hub for teamwork, Teams builds on a foundation of Office 365 services and is included in every Office 365 subscription.
With the growth of Teams, it is an ideal service to start with. It also provides a solid foundation to cross sell additional licensing. ➔ Teams is included in every Office 365 subscription, so often there is room to upgrade to a higher Office 365 plan. Office 365 E1 → Office 365 E3 → Office 365 E5, or even upgrade to Microsoft 365. ➔ Teams leverages Office 365 services including SharePoint, Exchange, OneNote, and PowerBI. This provides an opportunity to upsell to services related to these additional Office 365 offerings. ➔ Enterprise Mobility + Security (EM + S) provides additional security and management for Office 365. Mobile Device Management, Dynamic Office 365 Groups and Conditional access to Teams are additional security considerations most customers will want to consider when deploying Teams, and provide an upsell opportunity to Microsoft 365 licenses.
CROSS SELLING ADDITIONAL SERVICES When deploying Teams, partners have to opportunity to incorporate additional services to their offer, including ongoing managed services. This is in addition to the upsell and cross-sell opportunities provided by Teams itself, such as governance advisory services and custom Teams solutions. Here are some additional services to consider: • Migrating file shares or other cloud storage providers to SharePoint and OneDrive • Migrating on-premises email or another email provider into Exchange Online • Deployment of Office 365 ProPlus, with the Teams Client, to the desktop • A health check of Active Directory and configuration of Azure AD Sync • Migration from Skype for Business (on premises or in the cloud) to Teams. • Deployment of additional security features included in EMS licensing • Securing corporate data in Office 365 with Azure Information Protection (AIP) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) • Additional Microsoft 365 services including the suite of Office 365, EMS, and Windows 10 products. With the breadth and depth of Office 365, and even more with Microsoft 365, there are any number of services partners can upsell to outside of just Teams. The number of services in Office 365 that Teams leverages provides an easy pathway.
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VOICE AND CALLING OPPORTUNITIES There are a range of additional sales opportunities relating to Teams calling, meetings and devices. The phone system license drives upsell from Office 365 E3 to Offices 365 E5 licenses. It can also be sold as an add-on SKU on top of either E1 or E3 licenses. Phone system represents up to a 36% revenue growth opportunity for partners when adding calling and/or meetings to a teamwork practice. Audio conferencing represents an upsell opportunity especially for licensing sales and can ultimately drive an E5 license upsell sales motion. Additional opportunities for cross selling related to voice and calling come from devices, such as phones, headsets, and room systems. Devices for cloud voice are mostly provided by third parties. Microsoft provides a list of Teams devices partners can use when planning which physical devices are needed for the deployment. This list includes personal devices as well as room systems to be deployed to meeting rooms and conferences rooms. Finally, there are good opportunities to provide professional services for calling, meetings and devices deployment, migration and configuration, and to move into the managed services space for on-going management.
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Firstline Workers Opportunity As the hub for teamwork, Teams was built to work for every organization, regardless of industry or vertical. It delivers the tools that every employee - from the boardroom to the firstline - need to do their work.
Firstline workers often compose most of the workforce A focus on these firstline workers is also key in several and are in roles where they are: industries, including:
• First to engage customers • Shop Floor Workers • First to see products and services in action • Warehouse Clerks Manufacturing • First to represent a customer’s brand • Service Technicians It is their ambition, creativity and action that can unlock • Maintenance new ideas, differentiate the customer experience, and • Cashiers bring the strategies of the organization to life. Partners • Sales Associates cannot ignore the unique opportunity and potential that Retail • Store Managers these workers represent, and the tremendous value that • Inventory Associates can be unlocked by empowering them to do their best work. As partners consider their practice focus and the • Ground Crew services they will offer, consider targeting services directly • Drivers Transportation at firstline workers. • Flight Crew • Maintenance Crew WHO ARE FIRSTLINE WORKERS? • Front-of-house staff Firstline workers across all enterprise organizations total • Guest Services about 690 million team members, and 78% of business Hospitality • Event Staff leaders say that connecting these firstline workers is • Housekeepers critical. Increasing the efficiency of firstline worker is the primary driver for business leaders. Research has shown • Clerks that by deploying Office 365 to firstline workers: • Fire Fighters Public Service • An average of 116 work hours per year are saved for • Police Officers each firstline employee • Parks & Recreation • Reduces turnover an average of 8% • Providers • Security breaches are cut by 61% Healthcare • First Responders • Nurses
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Getting Started with Firstline Workers
Firstline engagements most often start from a consultant assessment. This is a critical step to understand customers' pain points. Through an assessment, partners can provide customers with a roadmap that details their end-to-end digital transformation and helps them understand how it can be broken down into multiple waves. The firstline wave, or services that impact firstline workers the most in the Office 365 productivity suite and Teams, are normally Exchange Online, followed by Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive.
COMMON CHALLENGES LICENSING FIRSTLINE WORKERS Firstline workers present several challenges for customers, Office 365 includes a license specifically tailored to both when it comes to communicating and collaborating empower firstline workers in the F1 SKU. The F1 SKU as well as empowerment and engagement that Teams can provide access to: address. These include: • Microsoft StaffHub – Roll out Microsoft StaffHub to • C-suite and corporate users are unable to enable corporate announcements and news to flow communicate with firstline workers and coordinate all the way to firstline workers. activities and efforts between distributed teams • Teams Live Events – Enable live all-hands meetings • Firstline workers are unable to communicate with to facilitate communications between the C-suite and each other to find and share best practices and the firstline workforce that can result in better contribute towards communities of people who share engaged and more informed employees their role or interests • Microsoft Teams – Enable Teams and drive adoption • Organizations are unable to tap into the insights, engagements to allow companies to coordinate expertise, and knowledge of their firstline workers to distributed teams with the hub for teamwork that gather new ideas and find solutions to problems includes persistent chat in real time across remote • Firstline worker are unable to communicate in real- sites from any supported device and instant access to time with a subject matter expert if they need relevant content and tools. assistance completing a complex task • Yammer – Enable Yammer and drive adoption • It is costly and time consuming to onboard new engagements to help workers share and find best firstline workers, but business operations and practices across the company and facilitate the customer service is negatively impacted if not done crowdsourcing of new ideas and solutions properly • SharePoint – Build SharePoint based portals to • Managing firstline worker schedules and tasks are support inclusive communities of interest costly and cumbersome to create While the F1 SKU enables these features of the Office 365 • Continuously training the firstline workforce to ensure productivity suite, it is a partner who can provide services they stay current and effective to allow customer to leverage these solutions. • Losing the knowledge of experienced firstline workers when they leave or retire
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FOSTER CULTURE AND COMMUNITY TRAIN AND UPSKILL EMPLOYEES A strong culture is vital to any successful organization, and Regardless of industry, a critical question for executives is it should reflect an organization’s digital aspirations. Too whether they are effectively developing and equipping often, culture is treated as a sounding board to create their employees for success in the digital age. In the positive feelings about the workplace, instead of sharing a firstline workforce, this means addressing the tremendous way to help everyone work better together. A high- variability in workers roles, needs, tenure and profile. As a performing culture is about results, driven by employee partner, use Teams to provide the skills, confidence, and empowerment, engagement, and passion for what the access to information these workers need to do their best company does. Nowhere is this more important than on a work. company’s firstline. Examples: Examples: • Distribute onboarding materials and training to any • Broadcast interactive town hall meetings supported device • Coordinate distributed teams with a hub for • Share dynamic, role-based content and video teamwork • Enable employees to find and build on the work of • Share and find best practices across the company others • Build inclusive communities of interest • Retain and manage institutional knowledge in one place Culture helps connect the firstline workforce to the company’s strategic vision, which provides a compass for Employees want to be more versatile and valuable to an decision making, innovation and action. organization. Effective training and upskilling programs help employees gain and apply new skills. If done well, the DIGITIZE BUSINESS PROCESS payoff can be substantial in terms of loyalty, talent, Companies have always wanted to get close to their knowledge retention, and performance for customers. customers. Digital transformation allows them to do that – without the pressure to do so quickly. Examples: • Create, update and manage schedules and tasks • Automate everyday activities and workflows • Optimize resource allocation using IoT-based signals
Benefits include improvements in the customer experience and greater consistency across the business in spotting and resolving problems. Digitizing the firstline workplace allows organizations to accelerate performance to keep pace with the demands of the digital age.
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DELIVER REAL-TIME EXPERTISE In our experience, the biggest challenge is not in the understanding or expertise associated with new technology or operating in a digital workplace – we know and can apply that. The biggest problem is our inability to provide the expertise we have today, in the environment that our workforce operates. Examples: • Crowdsource new ideas and solutions • Work in context across physical and virtual space with mixed reality • Connect across remote sites on any device • Tap available talent when and where it’s needed Teams offer companies modern tools to transform the access, application, and availability of real-time expertise to solve business problems and as a partner they can enable this culture within their customer’s organization.
MINIMIZE RISK AND COST The firstline and cyber-threat landscape continues to evolve, and challenges are real for IT and have real impact on individuals and businesses. As customers continue to spread digital transformation across the organization and to all workers, through services partners can streamline IT management and extend the security and protection of Office 365 to all employees, endpoints and environments. Examples: • Streamline management across devices, including kiosks and signage • Secure firstline access to corporate apps with identity-driven protection • Meet evolving workplace regulatory requirements • Accelerate GDPR compliance
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There is a widening skills gap where the existing workforce has been educated and trained to obtain the jobs of yesterday and not“ the jobs of today and tomorrow.
JEFF WEINER CEO of LinkedIn
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Define Service and Solution Offerings Now that partners understand some of the core capabilities of Teams, let’s start looking at how to build a practice. Partners may feel like they are building a new business from the ground up. It is important to start with the basics and expand into more complex offerings as they and their customers grow.
SURVEY DATA 45% of Teams partners surveyed offer custom solution deployment services, averaging over $80k/year in revenue over the past 12 months, as well as in follow-on revenue for additional services.
Process automation is the #1 custom solution development offering:
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Partner offerings will typically fall into one or more of three categories: project-based services, managed services, and reusable IP. In any of these categories, partners may offer solutions that focus on an industry or vertical, but overall, the categories will be the same. These categories are all a part or continuum that partners can think of as good, better, and best. Partners may choose to focus on one, or all of them. It is important to recognize that they are complementary. If partners are just getting started, project services may offer the quickest and easiest path and as their business matures, they can take on more profitable services with repeatable revenue built-in to the service offering.
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Project Services As customers move into a cloud-first world, they will need help getting there.
There is a hurdle to transitioning from on-premises servers content from file shares and other legacy repositories into and software to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings a cloud offering that meets the latest requirements helps such as Microsoft 365 and the Office 365 productivity to increase security and compliance. Migrating to Teams suite. One type of service partners can provide customers can also help customers increase their productivity. is professional services. Project services tend to be a one- Providing guidance on migrating to Teams and executing time, project-based delivery, although as they expand into migrations can help accelerate customer’s digital more complex offerings they will have the opportunity to transformation. offer pull-through project services such as change management or ongoing training and customer IT CONTROLS AND INFORMATION education initiatives. ARCHITECTURE Examples of project services include migrating customers When customers adopt Teams and the Office 365 from on-premises to the cloud, putting IT controls and productivity suite, they are concerned about IT controls information architecture in place, or setting up cloud- and governance around SharePoint / Teams / Groups and based security. While customers may come back to them lifecycle management. Partners who are familiar with the for multiple project service engagements, this type of governance and compliance controls that exist around offering will not have the recurring revenue streams they Teams and Office 365 have an opportunity to offer project will find in categories such as managed services. services around implementing these controls. If they do not enjoy the ongoing maintenance of a system These controls decrease the risk of litigation for customers once it’s been deployed, or they like performing as content is controlled, discoverable, and retained as challenging implementations and nailing down every required. While these controls exist, customers often find detail, this is one type of service they could focus on. In it too burdensome and time consuming to implement the following section, we will explore a few. despite the increased risk. This an excellent opportunity for partners to bring value MIGRATION to their customer and significant potential monetary Organizations typically own and maintain multiple savings by implementing retention policies, labels, and repositories – file shares, legacy SharePoint sites, cloud- other controls based on the workloads they consume. based file repositories such as Box, and Exchange public Other governance controls such as naming policies can folders. This leads to increased compliance risk, lack of provide consistency in what otherwise would be an clarity for end-users around teamwork and increased cost inconsistent teamwork toolkit. This consistency eliminates to own and maintain multiple repositories. When concerns over information stored in Teams being difficult customers do not fully leverage their investment in Office and time consuming to locate. 365, end-users experience friction and a loss in When partners help customers implement controls for productivity when using legacy tools and repositories. security, governance, and compliance they offer not only Customers need guidance on what to migrate, and how to project services, but also become a trusted advisor to their migrate to new teamwork repositories. As a partner, they customers, advising and educating them on when to use can assist customers by helping to reduce their IT spend the right tool. This increases engagement and adoption by consolidating content into files within Teams. Moving and provides the potential for follow-on service delivery.
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INFORMATION PROTECTION As the workforce gets more and more mobile, Chief involves partners working with customers to build Security Officers (CSOs) are concerned about keeping comprehensive information protection plans that their sensitive information from being accidently leaked. provides balance between productivity and security. Organizations want to ensure that security is enhanced as Partners can also assist in optimizing customers’ they embrace Microsoft cloud services and they need investment in Microsoft 365 by retiring traditional security layers of protection and control based on content products and introducing the value of content sensitivity. Customers also want to control the level of classification through automatic and manual classification access from unmanaged devices and when data is using services such as Azure Information Protection (AIP). accessed. They need visibility into and control of external Another important area of information protection is to users accessing corporate content. Finally, customers need work with customers to leverage Data Loss Prevention policies in place that not only assure alerts for suspicious (DLP). Implementation of these tools and services helps behavior, but also containment of the breach. customers not only to keep their data safe, but also compliant with security or regulatory requirements while As security is paramount to any organization, this provides using Microsoft productivity tools in a way that doesn’t partners an opportunity to build a project services impede productivity. offering around information and data protection. This
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Managed Services In a cloud-first world, it’s no longer enough to sell a project and simply move on to the next one. Partners need to think differently.
Offering managed services and becoming a Managed Services Provider (MSP) allows partners to focus on developing customers as opposed to project services where they develop and sell projects. It is now more crucial than ever to complement any solutions partners may provide with a full services team to support clients as efficiently and effectively as possible. The days of the system integrator and project resellers are fast disappearing.
WHAT IS THE MSP HUB? The Managed Services Provider hub on the Microsoft Partner Network is a one-stop guide to researching, building, and growing a managed services provider offering. This site provides partners with key information on how to build and grow their own managed services practice from square one. And once they get started, they learn how to further differentiate, promote, and expand the scope of their business, to provide customers with long-term value and partners with long-term profitability.
MORE THAN A VENDOR, A TRUSTED ADVISOR MSPs deliver a set of services to clients, either proactively or as needed. For more than 20 years, large enterprises have relied on managed services businesses to manage information and customer workloads. Adding managed services to a business helps address customers’ needs by uncovering opportunities that provide long-term value with ongoing services and potentially intellectual property. Additionally, adopting managed services is an efficient way to stay up to date on technology, access necessary skills, and address a range of issues related to cost, quality, and risk.
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Take Generation-e for example. Once they added Additionally, when building cloud solutions on top of a managed services to their business, they saw an almost managed services offering, they are future proofing their immediate cash flow benefit with 36% of their revenue business. Managed services revenue for cloud services will now coming from their managed services offering. Loryan grow from $17 billion in 2014 to $43 billion in 2018 — 60% Strant, the cloud CTO at Generation-e, refers to this as faster than revenue from infrastructure-only services. “long-term revenue”, meaning they have stronger customer engagement beyond just an IT solution. GETTING STARTED WITH MANAGED SERVICES Managed services are premium services provided on an The most valuable part of a managed services business is ongoing contractual basis, rather than a cost-per-project. right in the name -- services. It’s a long-term investment—not only in their own The MSP Hub will provide the necessary solutions and business, but also in the customers’ operations. The products to help a business optimize its services and truly average margins for a managed services provider are 50- engage with customers to meet their needs and solidify 60% compared to that of a reseller, which are less than relationships. Those relationships will ensure a recurring 20%, meaning an MSP model is more than twice as revenue stream that grows as a customer’s consumption profitable. and subsequently, their business grows. We’ve provided While the idea of adding managed services to their step-by-step guidance to implement the appropriate business may feel intimidating—and it is a major shift—it Microsoft solutions to not only help build a managed is important to understand the evidence and services business but also grow one. opportunities to help educate customers through the One of the best ways to fully optimize their managed process. While there may be benefits to businesses in services business is through our Cloud Solutions Provider which vendors are called in on a per-project basis, (CSP) program. CSP enables a business’s transition to the providing proactive services under a long-term contract is cloud, allowing for MSPs to embrace transformation and inherently more sustainable than relying on a break-and- begin taking ownership of end-to-end relationships. With fix business. According to an IDC study, managed services CSP, partners can future-proof their business by account for a 45% increase in profits, higher than both combining high-margin service offerings with Microsoft resale and professional services. cloud products.
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Managed services are critical to us because we now live in a consumption economy. “And what most of our clients want is actually to buy a service from us and have that service help them not only provide support service, but also help them consume and use those products.
TIM WALLIS CEO, Content and Code
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Reusable IP If partners did something custom that was successful for one client, there may be more customers that would benefit from solving the same problem.
The idea of coming up with “productized” IP may sound With custom applications for customers, it is like project daunting, but many partners find that they already had IP, services in that it is a single engagement where the and it just wasn’t packaged that way. For Teams, partners partner handles all the details and problem solving to tie reusable intellectual property falls under broader the custom application into Teams. When creating an categorization of custom app development. A custom app application to sell, partners may choose to sell it using a development service offering is quite a bit different than subscription-based model, common in cloud scenarios, project services or managed services. For partners that where they are able to generate recurring revenue, sell offer application development services for Teams, the additional upgrades, and develop a long-term focus is going to be writing code and building relationship with the customer as they purchase and use applications, rather than more of the administration type the application they developed. tasks of the previously mentioned services. Both options for development services can be chosen, and However, this application development can take many often can even be done simultaneously. It is also possible forms. As this document covers later, there are several that an application that starts out as a custom application verticals within Teams development that a partner can for a single customer could turn into an application that take advantage of. There are many ways to build can be resold to multiple customers. applications with Teams, such as: • Messaging extensions • Tabs • Bots • Line of business applications integrated with Graph API Application development can also take some of the benefits from both project services and managed services. Partners can provide custom application development in Teams where they assist customers in moving legacy applications into Teams by recreating the app to be hosted on Teams, or simply integrating the application into Teams. Partners can also create their own application that integrates with Teams to solve a common business problem.
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Developing Teams Offerings Developing a Deployment, Security and Governance Offering
Let’s get started by thinking about the core usage scenarios enabled by Teams, and how these are supported by the core architecture. We’ll then look at how to deploy Teams, together with security and governance.
A team is a collection of people, content, and tools private team discoverable, the team is included in the list surrounding different projects and outcomes within an of suggested teams and search results in the Teams organization or organization wide. gallery. Use discoverable private teams for projects and groups within an organization that everyone is aware of • Teams can be created to be private to only invited and where access to conversations and files in the team users. need to be controlled. Examples include a team for their • Teams can be created to be private and discoverable. HR department, a team for all managers in their They can be seen but are only available to invited organization, and a team for a manager and their direct users. reports. • Teams can be created to be public and open to anyone within an organization to join (up to 5000 NON-DISCOVERABLE PRIVATE TEAMS members). Non-discoverable private teams can only be joined when A team is designed to bring together a group of people the team owner adds users to them. When they make a who work closely to get things done. Teams can be private team not discoverable, it's hidden from the list of dynamic for project-based work (for example, launching a suggested teams and removed from search results in the product, creating a digital war room), as well as ongoing, Teams gallery. Use non-discoverable teams to collaborate to reflect the internal structure of their organization (for on sensitive and highly confidential topics. Examples example, departments and office locations). include a team to discuss an upcoming acquisition and a team to discuss a change in an organization's strategic ORGANIZATION-WIDE TEAMS direction. If their customer has no more than 5,000 users, they can create an org-wide team. Org-wide teams provide an PUBLIC TEAMS automatic way for everyone in an organization to be a Public teams are available for all users in an organization part of a single team for collaboration. For more to join. Public teams are visible to everyone in the Teams information, including best practices for creating and gallery, and users can join a public team without having to managing an org-wide team, see Create an org-wide get approval from the team owner. Examples of public team in Microsoft Teams. teams include a team to discuss technology news, a team to get feedback about their products, and a team for DISCOVERABLE PRIVATE TEAMS people carpooling to work. Discoverable private teams can only be joined when the team owner adds users to them. When they make a
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that they share in a chat are stored in OneDrive for Teams Architecture Business).
Teams is built on Office 365 groups, Microsoft Graph, and • Channels are most valuable when extended with the same enterprise-level security, compliance, and apps that include tabs, connectors, and bots that manageability as the rest of Office 365. Teams leverages increase their value to the members of the team. To identities stored in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). learn more, see Apps, bots, & connectors in Teams.
THE STRUCTURE OF TEAMS Team membership To see where Teams fits in the context of Microsoft 365, When Teams is activated for an entire organization, check out the Teams as part of Microsoft 365 architecture designated team owners can invite any employee they poster. work with to join their team. Teams makes it easy for team When a team is created, here's what gets created: owners to add people in the organization based on their name. Depending on the organization's settings, guests • A new Office 365 group who are team members but outside of their organization • A SharePoint Online site and document library to can also be added. See Guest Access in Microsoft store team files Teams for more information. • An Exchange Online shared mailbox and calendar • A OneNote notebook hosted in the SharePoint Online Team owners can also create a team based on an existing site Office 365 Group. Any changes made to the group will be • Ties into other Office 365 apps such as Planner and synced with Teams automatically. Creating a team based Power BI on an existing Office 365 Group not only simplifies the process of inviting and managing members, but also syncs When they create a team from an existing group, that group files inside of Teams. group's membership, site, mailbox, and notebook are surfaced in Teams. To learn more, check out the Groups in Team roles Microsoft 365 for IT Architects poster. There are two main roles in Teams: To customize and extend Teams, add third-party apps through apps, bots, and connectors. With Teams, they can • Team owner is the person who creates the team. include people from outside their organization by adding Team owners can make any member of their team a them as a guest to a team or channel. As part of Office co-owner when they invite them to the team or at any 365, Teams offers a robust development platform so they point after they’ve joined the team. Having multiple can build the teamwork hub they need for their team owners lets them share the responsibilities of organization. managing settings and membership, including invitations. Team channels • Team members are the people who the owners Conversations, files and notes across team channels are invite to join their team. only visible to members of the team. Channels are • In addition, if moderation is set up, team owners and dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations members can have moderator capabilities for a organized by specific topics, projects, disciplines—- channel. Moderators can start new posts in the whatever works for their team. Files that they share in a channel and control whether team members can reply channel (on the Files tab) are stored in SharePoint. To to existing channel messages. Team owners can learn more, read How SharePoint Online and OneDrive for assign moderators within a channel. (Team owners Business interact with Teams. have moderator capabilities by default.) Moderators within a channel can add or remove other moderators • Team channels are places where everyone on the within that channel. For more information, see Set up team can openly have conversations. Private chats and manage channel moderation in Microsoft Teams. are only visible to those people in the chat (and files aka.ms/practiceplaybooks DEFINE YOUR STRATEGY PAGE 42
Team settings organization – or even have a Teams account – to join a Teams meeting. Live events are an extension of Teams Team owners can manage team-wide settings directly in meetings that enable them to schedule and produce Teams. Settings include the ability to add a team picture, events that stream to large online audiences. These are set permissions across team members for creating usually one (or maybe a few) presenting to large group of channels, adding tabs and connectors, @mentioning the people rather than the collaborative type environment of entire team or channel, and the usage of GIFs, stickers, and memes. a meeting. Calling Chat and messages Calling in Teams enables users to make and receive phone Chat is at the center of whatever they do in Teams. Chats calls, including features such as hold, voicemail, and call can be one-on-one or in a group. Sometimes they’ll want transfers. Direct Routing allows customers to connect their to talk one-on-one with someone. Other times, they’ll telecom voice trunks directly to Office 365 so users can want to have a small group chat. In Teams, they can do make and receive traditional phone calls, as well making either. Use a group chat when they need to talk to a small IP-based voice and video calls between Teams clients. group of people. They can also have chat conversations Apps within a Team channel as well. These chats are visible by everyone in the Team and all members of the Team can Apps are a package of capabilities that partners host and participate in these chats. that can be distributed through Teams or installed by Meetings and live events individual teams. The Teams developer platform makes it easy for developers to integrate their own line-of-business Meetings in Teams include audio, video, and sharing. And apps and services within Teams to add value, improve because they're online, they'll always have a meeting productivity, make decisions faster, provide focus (by space and never need a room or projector. Teams reducing context switching), and create collaboration meetings are a great way to come together with their around existing content and workflows. colleagues and clients both inside and outside of their organization. They don’t need to be a member of an
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Deployment Guidance
There are several things to consider when partners start to build a deployment plan for Teams
Whether a customer is a small business or a multi-national enterprise, to get started quickly on Teams, we recommend partners roll out Teams to two or three teams and channels for a select group of early adopters that they’ll work closely with during the pilot.
FOUR STEPS TO ENABLE EARLY ADOPTERS • Step 1: Create a first teams and channels • Step 2: Onboard early adopters • Step 3: Monitor usage and feedback • Step 4: Get resources to plan organization-wide rollouts
RESOURCES: ➔ How to roll out Microsoft Teams ➔ Check your Environments Readiness for Teams ➔ Prepare your Organizations Network ➔ Learn the Benefits of Desktop, Web, and Mobile Clients
BEFORE A LARGE-SCALE ROLLOUT Several factors could impact a large-scale rollout of Teams. These could range anywhere from ensuring the customer’s network is prepared for a Teams deployment, to ensuring that security and compliance of user data is considered, to existing workloads such as existing Office 365 or Skype for Business deployments. Here are several resources to read through to get started. We’ll cover these topics in more detail later in the playbook. ➔ Check your Environments Readiness for Teams ➔ Prepare your Organizations Network ➔ Learn the Benefits of Desktop, Web, and Mobile Clients
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Rolling Out Services Workload-by-Workload
Using the staged approach to roll out Teams workload-by-workload may be a good fit for larger organizations. When implementing Teams project, it’s not necessary to roll out all Teams services at once. Partners don’t have to complete a stage before they move to the next. Here are the Teams workloads, in the recommended order for rolling them out: There is also an Adoption hub resource available. Throughout their Teams rollout, be sure to take advantage of the resources here to help drive Teams adoption.
RESOURCES: ➔ Getting Started ➔ Chat, Teams, Channels & Apps ➔ Meetings & Conferencing ➔ Cloud Voice ➔ Adoption Hub
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Starting from Skype for Business
There are several scenarios to consider when moving customers from Skype for Business to Teams. If customers are coming to Teams from Skype for Business (online or on premises), or if they need a hybrid configuration, partners still want to follow the recommended path for rolling out Teams, but first they need to do some extra planning with their customer. Start by reviewing the guidance in this table that applies to the organization's profile
Organization profile Guidance
Currently using Skype for
Business Online, and ready to Go to Upgrade to Teams. RESOURCES: move to Teams. ➔ Upgrade to Teams ➔ Plan Hybrid Connectivity For a full-scale Teams rollout, first configure hybrid connectivity between on-premises ➔ Recommended Path to The organization is running environment and Microsoft 365. Start by Teams Skype for Business Server and reading Plan hybrid connectivity between ➔ Plan Direct Routing wants to roll out Teams. Skype for Business Server and Office 365.
Also review Upgrade to Teams.
The organization does not have Roll out Teams following the recommended Skype for Business Server, but path above. they do have an on-premises PSTN solution. They want to roll Then read Plan Direct Routing to learn about out Teams but want to keep using Phone System Direct Routing to hook their on-premises PSTN solution. up an on-premises PSTN solution with Teams.
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Skype for Business to Teams Upgrade Planning
The Skype for Business to Teams Upgrade Planning engagement is designed to run in 3, 5, and 10 days.
This engagement allows partners to provide customers with a roadmap and journey for their upgrade from Skype for Business to Teams. The engagement focuses on assessing the current infrastructure, examining use cases, and identifying blockers in order to complete an upgrade from Skype for Business to Teams.
OBJECTIVE • Provide an overview of Teams and desired functionality • Environmental, network, and workload assessment • Persona analysis and service mapping • Determine building blocks and migration approach RESOURCES: • Guidance and a timeline for a successful upgrade to Teams ➔ Customer Deployment Roadmap OUTCOME ➔ Skype for Business to This engagement is designed to provide customers a clear understanding of what Microsoft Teams Upgrade is required to upgrade to Teams and a path forward for their organization. The Planning Engagement outputs will be critical both in the upgrade and for the adoption and consumption of Teams.
Example customer deployment roadmap
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Chat, Teams, and Channels Planning
Out of the box, the default collaboration experiences for most organizations will work well. However, there are some considerations depending on a customer’s organization profile and business requirements before getting started.
CHAT DEPLOYMENT PRE-REQUISITES To get the full Teams experience, customers must have deployed Exchange Online and SharePoint Online as well as ensure the locations have the necessary connectivity to connect to Office 365. Ensure users have the current licenses to use the features they’re rolling out.
CORE DEPLOYMENT DECISIONS Plan for reviewing the default settings of chat, teams, channels and even the
various roles and permissions Teams provides to see if they need to be changed RESOURCES: to aligned to their customers environment. The following are some of the common settings they may need to change. ➔ Detailed Deployment Guidance • Teams administrators - Microsoft Teams Admin Roles ➔ Office 365 Licensing for • Teams owners and members Teams o Who should be assigned to each role? ➔ Check your environment’s o Setup and manage channel moderation. readiness for Teams • Messaging policies - Manage messaging policies ➔ Prepare your organization’s • External access - Plan for external access network for Teams • Guest access ➔ Office 365 Uls and IP o Turn on or off guest access Address Ranges o Authorize guest access ➔ Plan for Office 365 Groups • Teams settings - Configure Teams settings when Creating Teams • Teams clients - Get Clients for Teams • Teams usage reporting o Accessing Teams Usage through Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics o Permissions for Usage Reporting
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Apps, Bots and Connectors Planning
Apps let partners find content from their favorite services and share it right in Teams.
The apps in Teams help with doing things such as pin services at the top of a channel, chat with bots, or share and assign tasks. Like other settings, the out-of- the box settings will work well for most organizations. There are some settings that they should be aware of prior to rollout if changing them works better for their customer. The following are some of the more common settings they may make when deploying apps, bots, and connectors.
• App Availability Settings o Admin settings for apps in Microsoft Teams
• App Permissions RESOURCES: o Microsoft Teams app permissions and considerations o Publish apps in the Teams tenant apps catalog ➔ Overview of Apps in Teams • Bots for private chats and channels ➔ Deploy Apps, Bots, and o Add bots for Private chats and channels in Microsoft Teams Connectors o Admin settings for Apps in Microsoft Teams • Built-in and custom tabs o Using built-in and custom tabs in Teams • Office 365 and custom connect connectors o Use Office 365 and custom connectors in Teams
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Managing Teams
In addition to the deployment and adoption of Teams, partners need to plan for the ongoing management of Teams and continuing to integrate it into their customer’s organization. Managing Teams has several aspects that need to be considered. Teams is a product within the Microsoft 365 suites of products, but also brings several other Microsoft 365 products together. When thinking about Teams management, not only should the management of Teams be considered, but also the aspects of the other services that end up included in the Teams such as SharePoint files. There are also various locations Teams needs to be managed. Current locations for Teams management include the Office 365 Admin Center, the Teams Admin center and then some management from within the Teams client itself. The management of Teams can be a big job, especially when there isn’t a full understanding of everything involved in management Teams.
RESOURCES: MICROSOFT TEAMS ADMIN CENTER
➔ Microsoft Teams Management The Teams Admin center is their focal point for managing Teams-centric features Documentation such as Teams, Channels, Teams Apps, Policies, Analytics & Reporting as well as ➔ Microsoft Teams Admin Portal setting org-wide settings. The Admin Center can be accessed from the Microsoft ➔ Microsoft Teams PowerShell 365 Admin Center or directly via https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/.
MICROSOFT TEAMS POWERSHELL Teams has a rich set of PowerShell cmdlets to help automate common tasks such as cleanup and reporting. They can be used directly by an administrator or even as scheduled jobs in Azure Automation. The documentation for the Teams PowerShell cmdlets can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-powershell-overview.
MICROSOFT 365 ADMIN CENTER The Microsoft 365 Admin center is where they will create users, assign licenses and is also the central point for the security and compliance aspects of Teams. The Admin Center can be accessed from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center or directly via https://admin.microsoft.com/.
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Organizing Teams
Learn early the best practices for organizing teams to maximize adoption.
BUILD TEAMS GRADUALLY A Team usually starts with a small number of team members to brainstorm as the team moves forward, and then add new people or groups as it goes. The great thing with Teams, is that when new people or groups are added, they can quickly get up to speed on what has already been discussed as the conversations and files are available to users regardless of when they join. Try to avoid creating different Teams that have the same set of members, as this approach may not provide the desired focus to deliver the project or goal. Outlook is a great tool for sharing those types of group-wide communications.
CREATE CHANNELS TO FOCUS DISCUSSIONS RESOURCES: Once a Team has been created, it’s a good idea to start to think about the different ➔ Best Practices Organizing areas of conversations that will drive towards the goal and create initial channels so Teams that people know where to contribute and to find existing conversations. Be ➔ Working in Teams descriptive when naming channels to make it easier to understand what the ➔ Setting Up Moderation conversation in the channel there is to achieve. New tabs can be added to channels ➔ Working in Channels to add tools like OneNote, Power BI, or links to web pages and other content to make it easy for people to find content and share their thoughts.
Microsoft’s best practice guidance is to create teams with a larger set of members and more channels. To maintain a high-quality user experience, it is helpful to minimize the number of teams that require a person's participation. Channels within a team should be thought of as topics or workstreams to aid the team in organizing their work to deliver on their join objectives. There is no specific number of channels that should be created. Each team should craft channels based on their work, priorities, and style. Larger organizations may want to create teams as "templates" to standardize the information they capture about specific types of work. This is useful for strategic customer management, classroom management, health care scenarios, claims management, incident management, and other scenarios appropriate to a specific industry.
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USE THE GENERAL CHANNEL By default, the General channel is created when a Team is created. There are many useful purposes for this channel: • Use it to share an overview of what the team wants to achieve such as a project charter or who's who in the team. • Use it for new team member onboarding and other high-level information that a new team member would find useful. • Use it for announcements or configure the SharePoint News connector to post their modern status reports to this channel. For new or single purpose teams, it may be the only channel at the beginning as the team decides how Teams can best support their goals.
CONSIDER SETTING UP MODERATION IN CHANNELS Team owners can turn on moderation for a channel to control who can start new posts and reply to posts in that channel. When they set up moderation, they can choose one or more team members to be moderators (Team owners are moderators by default).
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Interoperability with Office 365
Teams is tightly integrated with other services in Office 365, such as SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Exchange online.
For the full Teams experience, every user should be enabled for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office 365 Group creation.
SETTING COEXISTENCE AND UPGRADE SETTINGS When they upgrade Skype for Business users to use Teams, they have several options to help them make it a seamless process for their users. They have the option to make coexistence and upgrade settings for all of the users in their organization at once, or they can make settings changes for a single or set of users in their organization. Learn more about these settings.
OFFICE 365 GROUPS AND TEAMS RESOURCES: Office 365 Groups is the cross-application membership service in Office 365. At ➔ Video Foundations of Microsoft Teams the basic level, an Office 365 Group is an object in Azure Active Directory with a ➔ Coexistence and Upgrade list of members and a loose coupling to related workloads including a SharePoint Settings team site, Yammer Group, shared Exchange mailbox resources, Planner, Power BI ➔ Office 365 Groups and and OneNote. They can add or remove people to the group just as they would Microsoft Teams any other group-based security object in Active Directory. Learn more here. ➔ How Exchange and Teams Interact HOW EXCHANGE AND TEAMS INTERACT ➔ How SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business interact It is important to understand how Teams and Exchange interact as they work with with Microsoft Teams organizations that have a hybrid Exchange environment or an on-premises environment. Learn more about these scenarios here.
HOW SHAREPOINT ONLINE AND ONEDRIVE FOR BUSINESS INTERACT WITH TEAMS Teams, Files, Tabs, and Channels are modeled and backed by SharePoint Online and OneDrive for business. It’s critical to understand the architecture and interactions between these two services for deployment and ongoing support. Learn more about SharePoint Online and OneDrive for business interact.
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Plan for Governance in Teams
Governance is essential for streamlining the deployment of products and technologies within an organization.
The purpose of governance is to help keep customer’s Teams deployment secure and compliant. It also helps to ensure the best return on customers’ investments in teams and provides the structure for the organization to expand and grow in a save and controlled manner.
PLAN FOR GOVERNANCE IN TEAMS When planning for governance in Teams, there are two aspects to consider. • Configuration: These are global settings and user specific configuration settings that much be configured. These are static, once they are defined, they are rarely changed. These settings are normally defined and configured by administrators. This would include things like Teams RESOURCES: creation, naming Teams, meeting policies, messaging policies, and other ➔ Video - Governance, configuration settings. management and lifecycle in • Lifecycle: This can be unique to each team. It consists of three phases. The Microsoft Teams initiation phase in which the Team is requested and created. The Active ➔ Managing policies in phase where the Team is being used regularly by users. Finally, the sunset Microsoft Teams phase when the Team is no longer needed, and it is archived and deleted. ➔ Office 365 Groups usage MANAGING TEAMS POLICIES guidelines As an admin, they can use policies in Teams to control what users in their ➔ Office 365 Groups naming organization can do in teams and channels. For example, they can set whether policy users can discover private teams in search results and in the team gallery and ➔ Sensitivity labels for whether users can create private channels. Microsoft Teams ➔ Setup Channel Moderation Learn more about managing policies in Microsoft Teams. in Microsoft Teams GROUP AND TEAM CREATION, NAMING, AND CLASSIFICATION ➔ Group policies and information protection. Their customer’s organization might require that they implement strict controls on how teams are named and classified, whether guests can be added as team members, and who can create teams. They can configure each of these areas by using Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).
GROUP NAMING POLICIES Group naming policies are used to enforce a consistent naming strategy for groups created by users in an organization. A naming policy can help identify the function of the group, membership, geographic region, or who created the group. The naming policy can also help categorize groups in the address book. The policy can also be used to block specific words from being used in group names and aliases. Learn more about Office 365 Groups naming policy.
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GROUP POLICIES & INFORMATION PROTECTION As Teams is built on the advanced security and compliance capabilities of Office 365 and supports classifications, auditing and reporting, compliance content search, e-discovery, Legal Hold, and retention policies. When it comes to polices and information protection, there is a set of core functionality available for Teams governance. Learn more about group policies and information protection.
SENSITIVE LABELS FOR TEAMS Sensitivity labels allow Teams admins to regulate access to sensitive organizational content created during collaboration within teams. They can define sensitivity labels and their associated policies in the Security & Compliance Center. These labels and policies are automatically applied to teams in their organization. Learn more about sensitivity labels for Microsoft Teams
SET UP AND MANAGE CHANNEL MODERATION IN TEAMS In Teams, team owners can turn on moderation for a channel to control who can start new posts and reply to posts in that channel. Team owners can also add team members as moderators. A team owner might not have the subject matter expertise at the channel level to best support channel moderation. By allowing specific team members to moderate a channel, the responsibility of managing content and context within a channel is shared between team owners and channel moderators. For example, a team owner can add business owners or content owners as moderators, which lets them control information sharing in that channel. Learn more about setting up and managing channel moderation in Microsoft Teams
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Plan for Lifecycle Management in Teams
Teams provides a rich set of tools to implement collaboration lifecycle management processes for an organization.
A valuable service partners can provide to customers is to guide them through the right questions to determine their requirements for lifecycle management and implementing the tools to use to meet them. Planning for lifecycle management is important, because it means building a plan to get work done effectively. Most projects consist of a beginning, middle, and end. Teams do too, but they can be constructed and used in such a variety of ways that it’s not always obvious which stage of their lifecycle they’re in. Having a plan for lifecycle management will help track an organization’s projects as they go through these stages. The following summarizes the stages of Teams lifecycle management. Read the full article for more details
RESOURCES: STAGE 1: BEGINNING ➔ Video - Governance, Create the team management and lifecycle in The first step is to define the goal of the team (which can range from business Microsoft Teams processes to org structure to projects, or simply creating an open, unstructured ➔ Team expiration and renewal collaboration hub). Defining the team goal goes hand in hand with identifying the in Microsoft Teams right people. As far as practicable, it’s a good idea to foster open collaboration by ➔ Archive or delete a team in aiming for broad membership. Microsoft Teams ➔ Plan for lifecycle STAGE 2: MIDDLE management in Teams As the teamwork begins, the team membership probably begins to evolve, along with the channel hierarchy. Unless the team needs to be strictly controlled and locked down, it’s a good idea to encourage exploration even if it leads to dead ends. As users get more comfortable, they can experiment with @team mentions, marking channels as favorite, and using the General channel to get comfortable with posting. Each team is different; let usage guide the evolution of the design. Monitor the usage and health of the team via Teams reporting capabilities
STAGE 3: END When the work of a team has run its course, it’s important to formally acknowledge that it’s over. This gives team members a sense of closure and prevents anyone from accessing outdated, stale information. Use the team itself to conduct closure rituals like post-mortems and executive summaries. Delete teams that are known to no longer be need (for example, a team created purely for testing or a team that contains sensitive data). Teams are deleted with a “soft delete” that IT can reverse for up to 21 days (30 days for Office 365 Groups). Deleting teams doesn’t affect any chats or content that were retained in accordance with compliance policies
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Security and Compliance
Teams is built on the Office 365 hyper-scale, enterprise-grade cloud, delivering the advanced security and compliance capabilities our customers expect.
AUDITING AND REPORTING Audit logs are accessed through the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center and exposes the ability to set alerts and report on events and exporting/filtering of data for further analysis.
COMPLIANCE CONTENT SEARCH Teams data (Chat, Channel Messages, Meetings and Calls) can be searched with rich filtering capabilities for compliance and litigation support.
RESOURCES: EDISCOVERY
➔ Overview of Security and Electronic discovery is the electronic aspect of identifying, collecting and Compliance in Microsoft Teams producing electronically stored information (ESI) in response to a request for ➔ Content Search in Office 365 production in a lawsuit or investigation. Capabilities include case management, preservation, search, analysis, and export of Teams data. This includes chat, messaging and files, meeting and call summaries. For Teams meetings and Calls, a summary of the events that happened in the meeting and call are created and made available in eDiscovery.
LEGAL HOLD During a litigation, it is often required that all data associated with a user (custodian) or a Team is preserved immutably so it can be used as evidence for the case. This is achieved by placing either a user (user mailbox) or a Team on legal hold. When any team within Teams is put on In-Place Hold (subset of the mailbox or site collection thru targeted queries or filtered content) or Litigation Hold (entire mailbox or site collection), the hold is placed on the groups mailbox. This ensures that even if end users delete or edit channel messages that are ingested into the group mailbox, immutable copies of that content are maintained and available in eDiscovery search. Legal Holds are generally applied within the context of an eDiscovery case. When should information barriers be used?
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Information Barriers
Information barriers are policies that an admin can configure to prevent individuals or groups from communicating with each other. This is useful if, for example, if one department is handling information that shouldn’t be shared with other departments or a group needs to be prevented, or isolated, from communicating with anyone outside of that group. Information barrier policies also prevent lookups and discovery. This means that if users attempt to communicate with someone they should not be communicating with, the user will not find the person they wish to communicate with in the people picker.
WHEN SHOULD INFORMATION BARRIERS BE USED? Information barriers might be used in situations such as: • A team must be prevented from communicating or sharing data with a specific other team. RESOURCES: • A team must not communicate or share data with anyone outside of the ➔ Information Barriers in team. Microsoft Teams ➔ Defining Policies for The Information Barrier Policy Evaluation Service determines whether a Information Barriers communication complies with information barrier policies.
MANAGING INFORMATION BARRIER POLICIES Information barrier policies are managed in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center (SCC) using PowerShell cmdlets. For more information, see Define policies for information barriers.
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Developing an Education and User Adoption Offering
Teams is more than a set of products – it is a fundamentally different way of working. Along with technology changes, partners will need to help manage changes to users’ expectations and behaviors.
Today’s workforce is more mobile, social, and global than ever. People have different backgrounds in technology and different expectations about communication and collaboration tools. Regardless of the tools people prefer, one thing is clear: most of their time is spent collaborating. Partners can make that easier with Teams and delivering services related to Adoption and Change Management (ACM). Research from Microsoft has shown that the ACM opportunity is not in the deployment of these technologies, which has fallen 18% YoY, but in Advisory and Adoption, Business Solutions, and Managed Services, all of which are up 10%, 17%, and 15% YoY respectively. This is across an overall change management market of $9.5 billion in 2019 and growing 7% annually. Typically, deployment and activation of these servers is achieved, but the adoption and proficiency are where the problems are.
The real change management opportunities are in helping the people change their way of thinking and working, thus reducing the customer risk and increasing their value as a partner. To implement Teams in customer environments, they’ll need to employ two complementary disciplines to help customers make a successful transition: project management and change management. Project management focuses on deployment planning and the implementation of the Teams technical component. Change management—the human side of the transformation—focuses on the activities required to prepare organizations for the delivered change. To facilitate the transition from the old way of working to the future state. And to embed the change as the new norm.
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Common approach Ideal approach
User focus is an afterthought. Rather than engaging users User adoption is a parallel, integrated work stream that in the process, an email containing a link to training, for includes deployment. example, is sent post-deployment.
INCREASE PROFITABILITY In 2018, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Research to look at partner opportunities across Microsoft 365 offerings. Through the study, we learned partners can make up to $45 per user, per month if they offer solutions across Security, GDPR, Teamwork and Modern Desktop. Specifically, there are significant growth opportunities in Advisory and Adoption services, Business Solutions and Managed Services.
Source: Developing a Teamwork Adoption and Change Management Practice Partner Guide
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Driving User Adoption in Teams
By driving adoption of Teams, partners can deliver an excellent user experience and increased business value.
Deploying Teams is just a first step. Changing existing work habits requires both motivation and effort, and so effective change management is key to a successful Teams adoption. For many of the partners we interviewed when writing this playbook, change management to drive adoption is a critical part of their service offering and a key income stream. The Change Management Framework for Partners provides more information on how to develop an Adoption and Change Management practice. Every adoption project varies in size and complexity based on their environment, but the initial steps are identical across the board. The Office 365 Adoption Framework breaks them down into three phases.
RESOURCES: START ➔ Teams Adoption Phase 1 In this first phase, they'll gather their team together, set up their initial teams, and ➔ Teams Adoption Phase 2 use Teams to begin planning Teams adoption. This approach will increase their ➔ Teams Adoption Phase 3 technical familiarity with the product and help them build the skills necessary to ➔ Change Management successfully complete subsequent phases. Framework for Partners EXPERIMENT In this phase of controlled growth, they'll bring their internal champions and early adopters onboard. They'll speak with their business users to identify scenarios that would immediately benefit from the collaboration and communications capabilities that Teams provides. They'll gather feedback that will inform their broad-scale adoption phase, and they'll make service decisions about governance and lifecycle management that will ensure a successful deployment.
SCALE This is the broad-scale deployment phase in which they'll turn on Teams capabilities for all their employees. In this phase, the size of their organization will determine whether this is a “go big” project that will turn on Teams for all employees simultaneously or if they'll approach this by region, business unit, or other method of segmenting their employee population. In this phase they'll move to a continuous delivery model. Employees, leaders, and business units will want to expand their use of Teams and will require training and their engagement to understand how to best use Teams and other features of Office 365.
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Tools for Driving Adoption
Leverage existing assets to build services around Teams adoption.
ADOPTION PROJECT PLANS Download the sample Adoption Project Plans to use as scaffolding for adoption projects.
EXAMPLE PERSONAL AND WORK STYLES RESOURCES: The example personas and workstyles can be used as part of their deployment ➔ Identify Key Stakeholders planning to map to their customer targets. ➔ Adoption Project Plans ➔ Persona and Workstyles WORKSTREAM TEMPLATES ➔ Workstream Templates ➔ Day in the Life Quick Sheets This template can be used to assign workstreams to key team members and ➔ Embeddable Videos communicate to stakeholders. ➔ Prepare your Help Desk ➔ Teams Adoption Guide DAY IN THE LIFE QUICK SHEETS ➔ Teams Customer Success Kit Inspire customer’s employees with these Day in the Life quick sheets.
EMBEDDABLE VIDEOS Leverage the Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways to help build champions within their customers for increased adoption.
PREP HELPDESK Use these resources to help prepare help desk to support Teams.
TEAMS ADOPTION GUIDE Check out the Teams adoption flipbook, an online guide that will help partners roll out Teams in their company. It includes many downloadable tools, templates, and other resources to help them along their Teams adoption journey.
TEAMS CUSTOMER SUCCESS KIT The Teams Customer Success Kit provides tools to help roll out Teams in their organization. It includes email templates for announcements, flyers posters, countdown, and tips & tricks. It also includes Getting Started guides for team leaders and IT administrators.
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Change Management Certifications
Build change management practice on a sound foundation by leveraging established industry methodologies and certifications.
Evaluate leading change management organizations to learn about methodologies, training and accreditation for change professionals to determine the right approach to support their offering.
INDUSTRY LEADING CHANGE MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATIONS
Prsci – https://www.prosci.com/
Change First https://www.changefirst.com/
Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) https://www.acmpglobal.org/
Change Management Institute
https://www.change-management-institute.com/
Note: Microsoft customer success managers align to the Prosci® methodology.
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Leveraging Teams Adoption and Change Management Planning Workshop
This workshop is designed to assist partners in effectively engaging with customer business leaders by helping them better understand their vision and outcomes, define use case scenarios, and determine measures of success to successfully adopt Microsoft 365 solutions for Teamwork in their organization.
The workshop guide brings together elements from the Microsoft 365 adoption guide, global best practices and new content built to support the customer engagement.
Title Role Recommended Skills
Account Manager Translate customer needs to consultant’s Knows and understands the needs of the delivery process customer Be the customer’s advocate Basic understanding of Microsoft 365 Review and approve final recommendations Basic understanding of Teams on the report
Architect or Prepares for the assessment with account Has prior design and implementation Consultant manager to understand customer challenges experience of the Microsoft 365 products including: Delivers/facilitates/moderates the assessment • Identity with the customer • Teams Creates and delivers the final report • Skype for Business Acts as a facilitator throughout the workshop • SharePoint process • Exchange • Yammer Has knowledge of adoption & change management practices
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Developing a Voice Calling and Virtual Meetings Offering
As the market for calling and meetings shifts, Teams offers a differentiated service with client support across mobile, desktop, and the web along with dedicated devices certified for Teams.
COLLABORATION TRENDS The Microsoft 365 Teamwork Partner Opportunity Total Economic Impact Study has identified collaboration as one of the most important initiatives and challenges that companies are facing over the next 12 months and forecasts that they will spend $40 billion on collaboration solution licenses and subscriptions in 2019.
CONSIDER MANAGED SERVICES Managed services increase revenues, provide better margins than project-based delivery, and create more strategic relationships with customers. The focus on Teams by Microsoft and partners has created enormous new opportunities with larger potential than previous solutions such as Skype for Business. One global partner specializing in collaboration, meeting and voice reported 40% year-on-year revenue growth and margins increasing from the mid-30% to the low 50% by moving from project services to managed services.
BUILDING A SERVICES PORTFOLIO Building a service offering surrounding voice calling and virtual meetings involves a spectrum of services. There are opportunities to offer services from envision and planning through to support. Four common phases offered by partners are: • Envision – planning and design services lay the groundwork for a smooth rollout and provides the opportunity to establish the customer relationship. Examples include helping a customer plan and design the next phase of their communications journey, which could be greenfield or migration planning. • Enablement – project-based engagements that typically light up Teams with follow-on activity to their basic planning and envisioning engagements. Examples include providing best practices for network and devices, basic user enablement for licensing, or user enablement along with policy creation. • Usage – services to drive usage and adoption of modern communications, that are typically longer engagements. Examples include adoption and change management services or utilizing bots and customs solutions. • Support – managed services focusing on monitoring, management, reporting, and support of Teams. Support provides a recurring revenue model for the ongoing management and operation of a customer deployment.
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Virtual Meetings in Teams
Virtual meetings in Teams are a rich, high definition audio and video experience that incorporates screen sharing and a complete collaboration experience built on the Office 365 platform. From the mobile phone to the boardroom, Teams meetings create an opportunity to improve productivity and efficiency of communication and collaboration. Partners have a variety of opportunities from professional services to end-to-end managed services to provide value to customers. • Teams Rooms – Teams Rooms bring the power of Teams into customer’s meeting rooms. They’ll have the ability to start their meetings on time with one touch meeting join, experience rich HD audio and video, and share content with the room and remote participants easily. • Meetings Services Portfolio – The services portfolio is composed of several elements that help customers to have more efficient online meetings. This portfolio can range from enabling and provisioning of users for the meeting service in Teams to managing the end to end experience in each of their conference rooms.
Phase one: Envision
Planning and design services for Teams meetings lay the groundwork for a TYPICAL SERVICES OFFERED smooth rollout. This phase is critical to help customers with their requirement ➔ Plan and design services gathering and scoping of meeting services. This can be a great way to initiate ➔ Network assessment the relationship with a customer and support overall modern workplace ➔ Device strategy transformation discussions. ➔ Meeting room assessment Online meetings delivered by Teams enables a partner to help a customer plan ➔ Migration planning and design the next phase of their communications and meeting journey. This ➔ Skype for Business to Teams can range from infrastructure and network readiness to developing a device Planning strategy including meeting rooms. These engagements can be greenfield or ➔ Advisory migration from an existing solution. Building an initial offer as a workshop or envisioning engagement can lead to lead to larger opportunities.
EXAMPLE CUSTOMER SCENARIO A customer that is moving from a traditional audio-conferencing solution to the rich Teams experience will need a partner to help them develop a strategy around their devices to help all different persona and spaces successfully join Teams meetings with the highest quality.
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Phase two: Enablement TYPICAL SERVICES OFFERED Enablement starts with project-based engagements that light up online meetings and devices by enabling them in Teams. Professional services for ➔ Network and room Teams meetings in this phase are known as deployment. Enabling a customer to remediation use meetings is the first step to helping them realize the value of their ➔ Configure Meetings First investment in Teams for improved productivity. This is a direct follow-on to an ➔ Training and adoption envisioning engagement that puts the customers plans and designs into action. services ➔ Live event SDN This can range from basic user and room licensing enablement and policy ➔ Audio conferencing creation to time and material engagements around network and other services. configuration The installation, provisioning and configuration of meeting room devices ➔ Cloud video interop creates a new opportunity for partners to grow their service portfolio. development ➔ Devices procurement and EXAMPLE CUSTOMER SCENARIO deployment A customer is looking to modernize their project management process to ➔ Teams Rooms deployment incorporate Agile methodologies and creates an opportunity for partners to and configuration help the customer use the entire meeting lifecycle and tools to improve standups and information sharing through channel meeting best practices.
Phase three: Usage
Usage is all about offering services to drive adoption of Teams Meetings. These TYPICAL SERVICES OFFERED are typically longer engagements for adoption and change management ➔ Migration assistance services or the opportunity to utilize bots, and solutions to drive usage. ➔ Meetings culture change Usage and Meetings are a critical part of growing the services portfolio for a ➔ Ongoing change partner. These engagements tend to be longer in nature and can be management services characterized as adoption and change management as a service. Due to the ➔ Ongoing training and changing culture of meetings and how people work, this can be a growth area adoption services for communications partners.
EXAMPLE CUSTOMER SCENARIO A customer has rolled out the technology changes needed to enable Teams- based meetings and calls but has yet to see widespread adoption as staff continue with existing work practices.
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Phase four: Support TYPICAL SERVICES OFFERED This phase of the service portfolio becomes an ongoing engagement to provide monitoring, management, reporting and support of different elements within ➔ Quality reporting and the service or deployment and tends to be a recurring revenue model. monitoring ➔ Network and usage Teams meetings brings several options for partners to build an end to end monitoring approach to supporting a customer’s meetings experience ranging from service ➔ Device management deck to service desk support to conference room equipment break-fix. ➔ Room Systems break-fix ➔ Tier 1-4 support EXAMPLE CUSTOMER SCENARIO ➔ Managed Teams Live Events A customer is using Teams meetings and a partner can report on their usage ➔ Meeting Room insights and quality while proactively proposing areas of improvement within their infrastructure and usage patterns.
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Teams Rooms
Transform meeting spaces ranging from small huddle areas to large conference rooms with a rich, collaborative Teams experience that's simple to use, deploy, and manage.
Help customers optimize and enhance their conference and meetings experience with the addition of Teams Room systems. Deliver consistent high-quality video and audio with easy set-up and management to share content with the room and remote participants. Customers can choose how and where they want to work and select devices designed for their space from one of our partners: Yealink, Logitech, Crestron, Polycom, Lenovo, and HP. Design and deliver professional services around all three stages of a Teams Rooms implementation: Plan, Deploy and Manage.
RESOURCES: Source: The Microsoft 365 Teamwork Partner Opportunity: A ➔ Plan Forrester Total Economic Impact study ➔ Deploy ➔ Manage ➔ Microsoft Teams Customer Pitch Deck
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Live Events with Teams
Live Events with Teams enables customers to broadcast video and meeting content to large online audiences.
Microsoft 365 Live Events allows customers to create a live event wherever their audience, team, or community resides, using Microsoft Stream, Teams, or Yammer.
AND ENCOURAGE CONNECTION THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE ENGAGEMENT WITH ATTENDEES BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER EVENT BENEFITS • Share knowledge and expertise quickly and easily • Reach any audience, anywhere, anytime with immersive communications • Deliver a spectrum of events, from informal webcasts to professional studio broadcasts
• Drive engagement with real-time discussion, interactions and video RESOURCES: • Unlock content with AI to find every moment that matters
➔ Microsoft 365 Live Events HIGH LEVEL COMPONENTS WITH MICROSOFT 365 LIVE EVENTS Pitch Deck ➔ What are Teams Live Events? The following diagram highlights some of the key components of Microsoft 365 Live Events.
Learn more about all the components of a Microsoft 365 Live event
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PLAN FOR LIVE EVENTS IN TEAMS When they're planning Teams live events to hold large meetings in their organization, there are several factors that to consider before starting to set it all up. Learn more about planning for live events
SETUP FOR TEAMS LIVE EVENTS When they're setting up for live events, there are several steps that they must take. • Step 1: Setup their network for live events in Teams o Prepare their organizations network for Teams • Step 2: Get and assign licenses o Who can create and schedule live events o Who can watch live events • Step 3: Setup live events policies Learn more about setup for live events in Microsoft Teams
USE POWERSHELL TO SET TEAMS LIVE EVENTS POLICIES They will use PowerShell to set and assign policy settings for live events. Learn more about the PowerShell cmdlets
CONFIGURE TEAMS LIVE EVENTS SETTING Use Teams live events settings to configure settings for live events that are held in their organization. They can set up a support URL and configure a third-party video distribution provider. These settings apply to all live events that are created in their organization. Learn more about configuring live event settings in Microsoft Teams
LEARN HOW MICROSOFT AND CUSTOMERS ARE USING LIVE EVENTS Learn how Microsoft and their customers are enabling better employee engagement and learning across their organizations.
Chasing the sun with a live event in Improving employee engagement with Employee engagement soars as Shell Microsoft Teams live events in Microsoft 365 energizes internal communication with Office 365
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Teams Calling
Teams in Office 365 provides business calling for people on a global scale, combining Phone System with Direct Routing and/or Calling Plans. Phone System enables call control and private branch exchange (PBX) capabilities in Office 365, effectively replacing their on-premises telephony hardware. Pair it with Direct Routing or Calling Plans and their users will get full calling capabilities in Office 365. Direct Routing allows a company to choose who provides voice lines to Office 365.
TEAMS CALLING PARTNER SERVICES PORTFOLIO Partners are updating their business model to support the cloud, especially in voice and telephony arenas. This transition to the cloud along with trends in technology, demographics and the business landscape creates an opportunity for partners in traditional telephony-centric businesses. Enabling users to take their phone number anywhere they are and delivering dial- tone all around the world helps partners capitalize on this shift to voice in the cloud. As partners shift their business to the cloud for telephony, they are applying their expertise for organizations to integrate new ways of working and innovative technologies.
Phase one: Envision
This phase of the service portfolio is comprised of planning and design services TYPICAL SERVICES OFFERED for telephony and calling, which is fundamental to establishing a successful ➔ Telephony planning customer relationship and Teams calling deployment. The scope within this ➔ Network assessment phase is helping a customer plan and design all elements of the voice ➔ Workflow analysis implementation and move to Teams. ➔ Device strategy The complexity of Enterprise Voice and telephony makes this a critical phase in ➔ Advisory successful migration from legacy or on-premises voice solutions. This is an ➔ Skype for Business to Teams opportunity to start migrating to Teams and help a customer understand the Planning next steps and actions required to move to Teams for calling. ➔ Personal analysis
EXAMPLE CUSTOMER SCENARIO A customer is currently on a legacy PBX and wants to move to Teams. A partner would engage in a migration plan across their voice estate through an envisioning session.
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Phase two: Enablement TYPICAL SERVICES OFFERED These are project-based services that focus on lighting up Teams calling, with a direct follow-on from an envisioning engagement to set up Teams Phone ➔ Network remediation System and connectivity to public switched telephone network (PSTN) services. ➔ Phone system configuration These services can range from basic enablement and handset configuration to ➔ Call Queues and Auto complex enterprise voice deployments with workflow and dial plan Attendants implementation. ➔ Direct Routing configuration There is significant opportunity for partners to offer deep expertise and ➔ Devices procurement and resources to enable Teams calling as customers transition from existing voice deployment platforms. ➔ Contact Center integrations ➔ Line of business integrations EXAMPLE CUSTOMER SCENARIO and Bots A customer is moving to Teams Phone System for their voice platform, giving a partner an opportunity to configure all Call Queues and Auto Attendants for different offices and call groups.
Phase three: Usage
Driving usage is critical in the migration to modern communications. It is an TYPICAL SERVICES OFFERED opportunity to help customers realize the shift from a physical phone to ➔ Training and adoption headsets and mobility. This shift in the way people work will require a partner to services guide all generations to adopt new technologies, especially in communications. ➔ Device deployment The opportunity for partners can range from training on phones and headsets ➔ Change management to change management for receptionists using a new attendant console to services manage calls that historically was managed from a PBX console. ➔ Contact center
EXAMPLE CUSTOMER SCENARIO A customer is moving their executive team to Teams. The executive assistant needs to manage boss/admin delegation and Shared Line Appearance. This is an opportunity for a partner to work with the executive assistant community to facilitate the shift to the new Teams experience.
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Phase four: Support TYPICAL SERVICES OFFERED These ongoing engagements are built to provide monitoring, management, reporting and support of the Teams calling deployment. Customers have relied ➔ Quality reporting and on partners to support telephony and Enterprise Voice for years and the monitoring transition to Teams continues this opportunity. ➔ Device management ➔ SBC management Teams calling enables several options for partners to build an end-to-end ➔ Tier 1-4 support approach that supports a customer’s calling and voice experience, ranging from ➔ Network monitoring service desk to service desk support to complete quality reporting and remediation along with providing dial tone through Direct Routing.
EXAMPLE CUSTOMER SCENARIO A customer is acquiring another company and is looking to integrate voice capabilities into their Teams ecosystem. A partner would engage to provide dial tone and monthly billing for the usage through Direct Routing as a service.
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Cloud Voice in Teams
Teams with chat, teams, channels, and apps has been deployed across a customer’s organization. Maybe meetings and conferencing has been deployed. Now the customer is ready to add cloud voice capabilities for its users.
CORE DEPLOYMENT DECISIONS These are the settings that most organizations want to change (if the Teams default settings don't work for the organization). Phone system (Office 365) Phone System is Microsoft's technology for enabling call control and private branch exchange (PBX) capabilities in the Office 365 cloud. What is Phone System in Office 365.
Connection to the public switched telephone network (PSTN)
RESOURCES: To connect Phone System to the PSTN so that users can make phone calls around the world, there are options based on business needs. Ask the following: ➔ Plan your Cloud Voice Deployment • Phone System with Calling Plans ➔ Phone System with Calling • Phone System with Direct Routing Plans Additional deployment decisions ➔ Phone System with Direct The following settings may also need to be changed, based on their organization's Routing needs and configuration: • Voicemail • Calling identity • Phone numbers from Microsoft • Dial plans • Call queues Learn more about these settings.
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Microsoft 365 Business Voice
Microsoft 365 Business Voice makes it easy for small and medium-sized organizations to turn Teams into a powerful and flexible telephone system.
Business Voice is a replacement for traditional telephony providers and in-house phone systems that can be difficult and costly to manage. They can set up both toll and toll-free numbers, call menus to help callers get to the right department, audio conferencing so they can host meetings with anyone, and more. They can even give people their own phone numbers so they can get calls directly. Business Voice does all of this by wrapping up Microsoft 365 Phone System features into a single and easy-to-manage bundle. They don't need to worry about choosing the right plan or feature; they're all there and set up for them. Because Phone System is a part of Teams, they can turn any PC, Mac, or mobile device, into a phone that can use their Business Voice phone number.
RESOURCES: Business Voice is aimed at organizations with up to 300 staff. It is currently only available in the UK and Canada, with global roll-out planned for CY2020. ➔ Business Voice for Partners ➔ What is Business Voice? ➔ Microsoft 365 Business Voice Service Description
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Business Voice Partner Practice Guide
The Microsoft 365 Business Voice Partner Practice guide helps partners effectively build a practice for Microsoft 365 Business Voice.
This guidance is designed to help partners focused on small and medium businesses understand the partner opportunity and how to build and implement a Teamwork practice for Microsoft 365 Business Voice.
TOPICS INCLUDE: • Microsoft 365 Business Voice value proposition and pricing • Partner Opportunity • Building and expanding Teamwork practice with Business Voice • Resources and call to action
RESOURCES IN THE GUIDE RESOURCES: After it is downloaded and extracted, the practice guide is divided into three ➔ Download the Practice folders: Guide LEARN The learn folder containers a FAQ focused on business voice, as well as specific guidance for partners on building their practice. This folder also contains a set of Training workshop content that they can use to execute sales and technical training events.
MARKET The market folder contains pre-built resources such as email templates, flyers, and day in the life infographics they can use for their marketing efforts.
SELL The sell folder contains pre-built resources for their sellers to use such as SOW templates, pitch decks, play cards, and even demo scripts for showcasing the product.
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Developing Custom and ISV Solutions
Potential offerings for partners to build and implement a Teams practice.
Teams includes integrations with the Office 365 productivity suite and partner applications out of the box. The value-add of extending Teams comes from the customization’s partners can build and deploy that allow them to reduce context switching and create conversation around content.
DECISION CRITERIA When partners ask themselves if custom or ISV solutions development is right for their customers, there are questions they can ask themselves. • Does it solve a real problem? Solutions should always have a measurable impact. This allows partners to define success for their customers. • How often will it be used? Solutions that are not going to be used often or that are hard to use drive engagement and adoption of Teams in the wrong direction. • How widely will it be used? The more users that consume theirr solution, the more users they can drive other services for through cross sell and upsell. • How does it improve business outcomes? Beyond delivering solutions that solve real problems, solutions will a measurable return on investment (ROI) for a problem and will lasting impact.
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APP SCENARIOS ACROSS INDUSTRY VERTICALS AND HORIZONTALS With a rich extensibility model, the business solution opportunities around Teams and teamwork are endless. Partners can envision with their customers, understand their business processes and teamwork needs, and connect Teams to the tools and services they use every day to help them fully realize the value of Teams.
INDUSTRY VERTICAL APP SCENARIOS
Supply chain real time collaboration Retail and consumer goods Shift, pricing, and inventory management
Patient care coordination Healthcare Telemedicine
Flight / route crew communication hub Airlines / Transportation Local crew shift management
New location development Mining, Oil, and Gas Daily quality monitoring and analysis
Emergency/disaster response and recovery Government Citizen service: permitting and licensing
Proposal Manager for commercial banking Financial Services Content sharing with compliance
Key accounts inventory, logistics Manufacturing Change order services
Field service real time remote assist Power and Utilities Billing and customer management
Leasing office tenant management Real Estate and Construction Real estate customer engagement
Looking horizontally, here are some common personas or areas of the business and app scenarios they may find within their customers:
FIRSTLINE PROJECT MARKETING HR SERVICE DESK WORKERS MANAGMENT
Shift management Brand partnership Recruiting tool Billable hours Self-service hub management knowledge base Remote worker task New hire onboarding management Industry event and support tools Client engagement Customer service planning hub desk Marketing hub Procurement center service
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Application Modernization
There is a three-step process to follow when looking to management space. SharePoint gives organizations a modernize applications for a customer. Following this step location to store files within a tab in Teams. This could will help identify those areas where an organization can be documents for HR or new employee onboarding benefit from a custom Teams solution for application resources. Evaluate opportunities to bring this modernization. knowledge into Teams using SharePoint, OneNote, or EVALUATE THE CUSTOMER OPPORTUNITY other tabs within a Team.
The first step of any custom teamwork solution should be ENROLL IN TEAMWORK SOLUTIONS to evaluate the opportunity. Make sure they are solving a ACCELERATOR specific problem that will improve a customer’s day-to- Customers are looking for solutions that can meet their day operations. unique teamwork needs. The Teamwork Solutions • LoB, third party app integration – What line of Accelerator initiative provides deep technical training and business (LoB) systems is the customer using? What support to help them build custom solutions on Teams third party apps do they use? Is there an opportunity platform. Eligible partners receive access to an exclusive here to centralize employee work into Teams? This Yammer community, technical previews, and support, could be integration with CRM/ERP, or maybe some along with case study and promotional opportunities. other third-party service integration. Other Partners with a specific custom solution to build for modernization opportunities could include customers can leverage this program to create these embedding other business data into teams or a solutions. There are some criteria partners must meet to service integration in a specific vertical. be accepted. • Secured & compliance communication – In every ENGAGE CUSTOMERS WITH A TEAMWORK organization, communication needs to happen WORKSHOP between employees. This can take many forms and span a multitude of products, which can lead to Finally, engage with customers using a Teamwork insecure and non-compliant communications, Assessment to discover business needs that can be solved especially when it comes to healthcare and legal. As by the solution and drive the intent to purchase and/or Teams is integrated into Office 365, it gives them a deploy Microsoft 365 teamwork services they have to communication platform that is secure and offer. The goal is to drive the customer interest to a compliant, but also tightly integrated with other proposal in three days. Microsoft provides partners with secure, compliant platforms for storing files, sending downloadable assessment materials. The Teamwork messages, and collaborating with other employees. Assessment enables engagement with business and IT • Business process & workflow automation – Every leaders to identify customer use cases, create strategic company has business processes and workflows it alignment, and define actionable roadmaps that deliver must follow. With the integration of PowerApps and transformational business value. The Business Decision Flow into Teams, this enables a perfect opportunity Maker Workshop drives customer intent through “art of for centralizing those process and workflows in the possible” demonstrations and identifying customer- Teams. Look for modernization opportunities within prioritized use cases. Planning workshops deliver deep an organization that can be improved with these tools dive guidance across three Teamwork priority areas— within Office 365 and Teams. education and user adoption, voice calling and virtual • Knowledge management solutions – A fourth meetings, and customer and ISV solutions. opportunity for modernization is the knowledge aka.ms/practiceplaybooks DEFINE YOUR STRATEGY PAGE 80
Build a Teams Custom Solutions Practice
Help customers realize the full value of Teams with a custom solution that integrates workflows and business processes in a single hub for teamwork, increasing productivity across the organization. Follow the ‘Building a Microsoft Teams Custom Solutions Practice’ guide to build a practice, gain insights into current market landscape, understand partner opportunity and how to build a custom solutions practice. In addition, learn how to conduct a Solution Envisioning Workshop with easy to follow step by step instructions and then create an offer based on a solution envisioned, designed and built for customers.
RESOURCES ➔ Workshop Guide ➔ Building a Microsoft Teams Custom Solutions Practice ➔ “How-to” webinar and guidebook on building apps for Teams. Find step-by-step guidance for how to envision, design, build, and publish an app—as well as links to in-depth information on all of these topics. ➔ Advanced Teams Solution Development course – a series of virtual instructor-led trainings between 1 and 2 hours each— which introduces the skills required for success in developing custom applications for Teams.
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Teamwork Extensibility
Teams has plenty of functionality right out of the box that can be leveraged without the need to extend teams any further. However, one thing partners can get big wins from is the extensibility of Teams.
This could be in automation business process or creating new capabilities to meet the needs of users that can’t be rich business applications that extend teams and take it to met via commonly available, off-the-shelf software or the next level. public Teams apps. To extend Teams, an app can be created—a package of Teams provides a rich collaborative environment to drive capabilities that the developer hosts and that can be development in addition to a set of developer platform distributed through Teams or installed by individual features to use to develop Teams line-of-business apps, teams. which can then be rolled out and managed for an enterprise through Teams. BUSINESS APPLICATION What’s in it for a partner? The Teams developer platform makes it easy for Create enterprise-specific solutions for customers by developers to integrate their own line-of-business apps integrating with existing internal services and processes. and services within Teams to add value, improve Publish a Teams line-of-business app to their private app productivity, make decisions faster, provide focus (by source and follow up by using dedicated channels for reducing context switching), and create collaboration feedback and resolving issues. around existing content and workflows. When an existing app or service is fully integrated into Teams line-of-business apps integrate the custom apps Teams, complexity will be reduced in both development and services that an organization developed or created aka.ms/practiceplaybooks DEFINE YOUR STRATEGY PAGE 82
and testing by removing legacy browser compatibility • Engage with humans (that is, have further requirements. This benefit is realized when Teams conversation in the channel) becomes the entry point for apps. • Trigger predefined workflows (Microsoft Flow) • Trigger Azure Automation events Does this support a customer organization’s digital • Pass control sentences to another bot to execute transformation strategy? the outcomes Yes, Teams customers are engaging on their digital In the following example, a team uses Azure sentiment transformation journeys to transform the way that they do analysis services via the bot framework to inform them business. A key component of any business consists of the about changes in customer sentiment. conversations that they routinely have as part of their daily work. The modern Teams workplace is encouraging Example: The marketing team has an Instant Response people to consider these conversations and explore how channel with a bot that uses the social media sentiment they can be turned into actions by bringing internal and analysis approach described in this article. The bot pings external information into the hub of the conversation and the Instant Response channel to alert the team when using that information to make decisions in a more customers are unhappy. The team collaborates quickly to informed and timely manner. There are over 200 “first- create a response, which is then posted on Twitter via a party” (created by Microsoft) and third-party Teams apps connector, a bot, or a flow that has an approval chain. to use to enhance these conversations, but sometimes Turn conversations into actions there’s a need for a custom app to leverage internal systems and data. Imagine a second category of this type of conversational enhancement where Teams extensions are used to create Teams line-of-business apps give partners the opportunity and package a Teams app that executes standardized to reimagine common, repetitive collaborative processes actions from regular meetings or common processes. in which people must get information from multiple Consider which internal processes in an organization systems before they can come to a conclusion, a would be enhanced if people were able to take direct conclusion that often needs to be discussed before it’s action from within a conversation: acted on. • Real-time incident response Here are two approaches that can be delivered through • Sports events Teams line-of-business apps. (These are just examples; let • Crowd management their imagination and business needs guide • Weekly triage meetings investigations!) • FAQ bot ACTING ON INTELLIGENT INSIGHTS Example: Imagine a sales meeting support bot: a salesperson pings the bot with the customer name, and People are provided with insights from several internal the bot interacts with several internal customer systems and external sources via bots and connectors in a Teams on the back end and returns a simple summary with the channel or conversation, and then they discuss the most top 10 “top of mind” items. These might include sales appropriate action and initiate a follow-up. figures, key contacts, customer sentiment, key blockers, Consider several sources where these insights might come opportunities, ice-breaker topics for conversation from from: social media, or news events relevant to the customer. • Microsoft Cognitive Services My customer already has line-of-business apps, why • Platform metadata (Azure) should their organization invest here? • Microsoft Graph (user interaction, usage, etc.) One great place to start is to consider how much • Connection from external and internal systems application and context switching are users of the current What actions could be taken then? custom apps forced to undertake. Changing focus from
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one app to another takes time and can cause a person to apps that are part of a workflow and to drive lose focus on the task at hand. conversation in Teams. • If the current line-of-business apps are used to Another area to consider is the daily discussions related to gather information or data that is then standard business items such as invoices, leads, tickets, or summarized, why not create a bot that can open job positions. Bring these items into the Teams interface with each app and return the conversation via developer platform features so the summarized data in a single response or card into conversation and the item are all in the same place. the channel? This way, the data will be accessible Consider two possible approaches: where it’s needed to support conversations, and • If the current line-of-business apps have browser- to drive key decisions and next steps. based presentations, they can simply pin the pages in a channel, to give easy access to the
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App Templates for Teams
App templates are production-ready apps for Teams that are community driven, open- source, and available on GitHub.
Each app template contains detailed instructions for deploying and installing apps for customers, providing a ready-to-use app that they can install and begin using immediately. The complete source code is available as well, so they can explore it in detail, or fork the code and alter it to meet a customer’s specific needs.
RESOURCES:
➔ App templates There are several key benefits of using app templates: • Plug and play experience: All app templates include deployments scripts that will allow them to host all necessary services in Microsoft Azure. No coding is required to deploy the apps. • Production-ready code: The app templates conform to recommended best practices around security and infrastructure, and all community submitted changes to them are reviewed to ensure continued conformance. • Customizable and extensible: While all app templates are ready to deploy as they are, Microsoft provides the entire code base and deployment scripts so that they can easily customize or extend them to fit a customer’s unique needs. • Detailed documentation & support: All app templates are accompanied by end-to-end documentation on solution architecture, deployment, and configuration steps. .
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Industry Solution Accelerators
Microsoft has developed open source projects for ready-made industry solutions. Just like app templates, these are customizable and extensible.
Partners have access to the entire code base and deployment scripts and because they are hosted on GitHub, they can be even be forked and commercialized under the MIT license. These solutions leverage Teams, Office 365 apps, PowerApps, Flow, Power BI, and even Azure services. Even if they do not deploy the apps for customers, they are excellent examples of what can be done by bringing multiple services together through a Teams app.
HEALTHCARE SOLUTIONS Huddle is a process improvement solution that uses Teams, Bots, Microsoft Planner, and Power BI to drive more effective huddle teams. RESOURCES: The Hand Hygiene Tracking Starter Solution showcases Teams, PowerApps, Flow, ➔ Huddle Power BI, and Azure SQL. ➔ Hand Hygiene Tracking Starter Solution FINANCIAL SOLUTIONS ➔ Proposal Manager Proposal Manager is a solution built on the Microsoft 365 platform that uses Teams, Azure web app, Excel, Word, and Microsoft Dynamics to show what can be done to implement a streamlined corporate lending loan origination process.
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Teams and the Graph API
Integrate existing or new applications with Teams using the Microsoft Graph API.
RESOURCES: ➔ Microsoft Teams API Overview ➔ Authentication and Authorization Basics ➔ Microsoft Graph Permissions
EXAMPLE INTEGRATION – AUTOMATE TEAM LIFECYCLES Use Microsoft Graph to create a new virtual team when a new business issue arises, add the right people to the team, and configure the team with channels, tabs, and apps. If they want to get the new team together to discuss the business issue,
MICROSOFT GRAPH PERMISSIONS For their app to access data in Microsoft Graph, the user or administrator must grant it the correct permissions via a consent process. This topic lists the permissions associated with each major set of Microsoft Graph APIs. It also provides guidance about how to use the permissions.
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Extending Teams
An app built on the Teams platform extends the Teams client (web, mobile, and desktop) with web services a partner can host.
TEAMS, CHANNELS AND GROUP CHATS The app will have access to APIs to get information about members in a conversation, channels in a team and meta data about the team or conversion.
Extensibility opportunities include Conversational Bots, Configurable Tabs, and Webhooks and Connectors.
MESSAGES With a messaging extension action command, their app can allow users to invoke their app's API from a message, sending the contents of the message to their app for processing or action. Their app can respond by presenting a form (a task module) to the user to collect more information, sending a reply to the original message, or sending a message directly to the user. There are three ways their app can help users create better messages • Messaging Extension - search commands allowing them to quickly search an external system, preview the results of that search, then insert the result into the chat as a rich card. • Messaging Extension - link unfurling allows their app to monitor web domains they're interested in. When a URL containing that domain is pasted into the compose message box, their app's API will be invoked, allowing them to add a rich card to the message with additional information about the item being linked to. • Messaging Extension - action commands present their user with a modal form (a task module), submit the results of the form to their app, then either insert a message into the conversation directly, or create part of a message the user can edit before sending to the conversation.
RESOURCES ➔ Webinar: Learn How to Build Microsoft Teams Apps ➔ Guidebook: Building Apps for Microsoft Teams ➔ Deep Dive on Teams Extensibility ➔ Conversational Bots ➔ Configurable Tabs ➔ Webhooks and Connectors ➔ Messaging Extensions
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Building Conversational Bots
Conversational bots allow users to interact with their web service through text, interactive cards, and task modules.
They are incredibly flexible - a conversational bot can be everything from a few simple commands, to a complex artificial intelligence and natural language processing powered virtual assistants. They can be one aspect of a larger application, or completely stand on their own.
PREPARE THEIR DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT The first step is to make sure that custom app uploading is enabled for the Office 365 subscription they want to build the app in. If they need a dedicated tenant, they can sign up for the Office 365 developer program.
CREATE THEIR WEB SERVICE The heart of their bot is their web service. It will define a single route, typically /api/messages, on which to receive all requests. If they're getting started from scratch, they have a few options to choose from.
• Start with quick start tutorials
• Bot samples: C#/dotnet or JavaScript
• Create from scratch by leveraging the bot framework SDK for their language
RESOURCES: ➔ What are Conversational Bots? ➔ Create a Bot for Microsoft Teams ➔ Quick Start Tutorials ➔ C# Bot Samples ➔ JavaScript Bot Samples ➔ Bot framework SDK aka.ms/practiceplaybooks DEFINE YOUR STRATEGY PAGE 89
Building Configurable Tabs
Tabs are Teams-aware webpages embedded in Teams. They can be added as part of a channel inside a team, a group chat or as a personal app for an individual user.
The following are some of the common user scenarios of why they would extend their app with a configurable Tab. • Scenario: Bring an existing web-based resource inside Teams.
• Example: They create a personal tab in their Teams app that presents an informational corporate website to users.
• Scenario: Add support pages to a Teams bot or messaging extension.
• Example: They create personal tabs that provide about and help webpage content to users.
• Scenario: Provide access to items that their users interact with regularly for cooperative dialogue and collaboration.
• Example: They create a channel/group tab with deep linking to individual items.
Whether they present their tab within the personal or channel/group scope, it will consist of one or more HTML pages that they host. Tabs with a personal scope consist of a single content page, while tabs with a channel or group scope will require a configuration page that sets the URL of the content page based on user input at the time of installation. There are three types of tab pages: 1. Content page, the page displayed in a tab. 2. Configuration page, the page used to set or update the content page URL, and add it to a channel/group tab. 3. Removal page, an optional page that is displayed when a channel/group tab is removed.
RESOURCES: ➔ Add tabs to your App ➔ Designing your Tabs ➔ Create a content page ➔ Create a configuration page ➔ Create a removal page ➔ Authentication flow for Tabs aka.ms/practiceplaybooks DEFINE YOUR STRATEGY PAGE 90
Task Modules and Cards
Task modules allow partners to create modal popup experiences in their Teams application. A card is a user-interface (UI) container for short or related pieces of information. Cards can have multiple properties and attachments.
There are several different card types to choose from EXAMPLE TASK MODULE when building their app: Here's what a task module looks like when invoked from a bot (color rectangles and numbered circles for reference Card Type Description only):
Highly customizable card that can contain any combination
Adaptive Card of text, speech, images, buttons and input fields.
Typically contains a single large image, one or more
Hero Card buttons, and a small amount of text.
List Card A scrolling list of items.
Flexible layout with multiple Office 365 sections, fields, images and
Connector Card actions.
EXAMPLE CARD
Receipt Card Provides a receipt to the user.
Enables a bot to request that a
Signin Card user sign in.
Typically contains a single
Thumbnail Card thumbnail image, some short text, and one or more buttons.
Used to return multiple items
Card Collections in a single response
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Webhooks and Connectors
Webhooks and connectors are a simple way to connect their web services to channels and teams inside Teams. Create a web hook to allow their users to send text messages from a channel to their web services. Once configured, users will be able to @mention their outgoing web hook and send a message to their service. Outgoing webhooks are configured on a per-team basis, cannot be included as part of a normal Teams app. They are best suited for completing team-specific workloads that don't require large amounts of information to be collected or exchanged.
CONNECTORS Use connectors to allow users to subscribe to receive notifications and messages from their webservices via an HTTP endpoint for their service to post messages to. Incoming webhooks Incoming web hooks are a quick and easy way to connect a channel to their service and are best used for scenarios that are unique to a particular team. For example, they could create an incoming webhook in their DevOps channel and configure their build, deployment and monitoring services to send alerts. Create an incoming webhook Office 365 Connectors Office 365 Connectors allow partners to create a custom configuration page for their incoming webhook, and package them as part of a Teams app. They can then distribute that app more broadly, or even to our app store. They send messages primarily using Office 365 Connector cards and have the ability to add a limited set of card actions to them as well. A good example of this is a weather connector that allows users to choose a location and time of day to receive updates about tomorrow's weather. They are configured on a channel level but are installed at a team level. Create an Office 365 Connector
RESOURCES: ➔ What are Webhooks and Connectors ➔ Create an incoming webhook ➔ Create an outgoing webhook ➔ Create an Office 365 Connector
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Application Development Resources
Now that they know about the extensibility points and opportunities for building custom solutions on Teams, let’s look at the process of creating and publishing their app.
DESIGN THEIR APP Some practical guidance is to start with understanding their user case and be clear on what problem they’re trying to solve. Plan early for requirements such as authentication and think about what their onboarding experience will be like. For UI elements, ensure they use the approved neutral pallet for backgrounds, notifications, text and buttons to ensure their app feels at home in teams.
BUILD AND TEST THEIR APP App Studio makes it easy to start creating or integrating their own Teams apps, whether they develop custom apps for their enterprise or SaaS applications for teams around the world by streamlining the creation of the manifest and package for their app and providing useful tools like the Card Editor and a React control library. Read the guidance for creating an app package for their Microsoft Teams app. This includes detailed information for creating a manifest for their app and details on icon requirements. There are three ways they can debug their application while in development: Purely local, locally hosted, in Teams, or hosted in the cloud. Read this guidance for more details.
DEPLOY AND PUBLISH THEIR APP Read the guidance here to learn how to upload an app package to teams. This guidance also provides detailed guidance on how to publish their app through the Commercial Marketplace.
AUTHENTICATION IN TEAMS APPS For their app to access user information protected by Azure Active Directory, as well as access data from other services like Facebook and Twitter, their app will have to establish a trusted connection with those providers. If their app needs to use Microsoft Graph APIs in the user scope, they'll also need to authenticate the user to retrieve the appropriate authentication tokens. Read more about Authentication in Teams
RESOURCES: ➔ Understand use case ➔ Designing UI Components ➔ App Studio ➔ Creating an App Package ➔ Debugging an App ➔ Upload an App Package to Teams ➔ Authentication in Teams
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Power Platform Including Power Apps & Flow
Partners can leverage the Power Platform in Office 365 to quickly build low-code apps, process automation, and reporting.
POWERAPPS PowerApps can be embedded directly into Teams. This enables creating rich applications in PowerApps (or apps customers have previously built) and bringing them into Teams to further enable a singular place to completely work. To add a PowerApps to Teams, users can select + to add any app to any of team channels or conversations in the team they are in.
The app appears as a tile under Tabs for their team. An admin can upload the app, so it shows up for all teams in their tenant under the All tabs section. See Share an app in Microsoft Teams. The app and the data sources will have to be shared with team members as this will not happen automatically. Learn about sharing an app in PowerApps. That is all that needs to be done to have an app running within a team channel. Here is an example of an idea’s submission app running in a Team channel:
Teams will show all the apps available to the user. A user can narrow down the app list by searching for app name, author or environment. They can then choose the app that they want to add to their channel:
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MICROSOFT FLOW Not only can PowerApps be added directly to Teams, but provides Microsoft Flow integration in Teams as well. With this integration, right from within Teams, Flows can be created and managed, received and sent approvals can be reviewed, and flows launched with the Flow Bot. This provides endless opportunities when it comes to automating activities and tasks within Teams and well as providing updates to a Teams channel, again, keeping users productive by providing the relevant information to them directly within Teams. An example Flow it times might be a Chief Compliance Officer at the Legal department at Contoso Inc. This compliance officer wants to send out an approval request Teams automatically detects all the reports in the Power whenever a new document is uploaded to the Legal folder BI groups and in My Workspace. The user can choose in a SharePoint document library. To inform approvers which ones to show in the Power BI tab in the channel. and ensure everyone has visibility into any feedback, notifications need to be sent to teammates on Teams. With the Flow integration in Teams, they can quickly create a flow to post this notification and boost the team’s productivity
POWER BI The last product in the Power Platform stack that integrates with Teams is Power BI. Groups in Power BI are built on Office 365 groups which as they know by now is also what drives Teams. So, they can add and interact with Power BI groups as well in their Teams as they really are just the same Office 365 Group under the covers. As a partner, this provides an opportunity to include rich visuals and reports in Teams right alongside all the additional important information a user is accessing in Teams. This also empowers their customer to have Now the Power BI report(s) is graphically displayed in the conversations around reports with numbers they may not Teams channel. look correct. Once again, the integration with these additional Microsoft 365 services provides limitless opportunities for their customer which lead to limitless ways to provide value to them. If a user has permissions to in their Teams channel, they just tap the + sign, then add Power BI as a tab in the channel. Power BI provides customers with an effective way to share dashboards, reports, and datasets with coworkers. Read more about groups in Power BI.
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Partner
Network
Hire & Train Hire &
Train
Microsoft Teams
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Executive Summary In the previous section, we reviewed the various services offerings their organization can pursue to set up, then build their Teams practice. Now that we’ve identified some of the recommended avenues of success, they may be wondering how to build and train their team. First, we’ll help them define the optimal members of their team and the skills they should bring to the table. If they need to hire to fill gaps, we’ll provide them with guidance, on job descriptions, and factors they should consider when reviewing a candidate’s skillset. It is the critical that all Teams practice resources are trained and then continue to receive ongoing training. We have provided details on the specific Microsoft certifications their technical resources should be working towards, both for their own professional development, and to earn their organization Microsoft Partner Network competencies.
Define the members and roles required Top 5 things to do Identify capability and skills gaps While crafting a game plan to build a Decide which skills to hire and train team, make sure to nail down these 5 Hire to fill gaps in the team tasks before moving to the next section. Train and certify everyone
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Create a Hiring Plan Partner Skillsets Human resources are a critical asset to any Referrals and LinkedIn are top sources for identifying services-based practice. Starting a new skilled labor. Once a candidate is identified, work practice requires partners to start with an history, cultural fit, and years of experience become the important considerations. evaluation of their existing team members Roles associated with cloud practices typically have at (if any) and then make the decision of least 3 years of experience. Furthermore, most whether to hire new employees or bring companies engage in at least annual ongoing staff their existing team up to speed. learning efforts such as conferences/events and online training. A median of 8.5% of technical resource time is spent on training. The following sections describe the recommended resources across sales, technical and support functions that they will likely need. In many practices that are just getting started they may not be able to fill all roles with individual professionals. In this situation one person will likely be required to fulfill the duties of multiple roles. RESOURCES ➔ Recruit, Hire, Onboard and Retain Talent Playbook ➔ Microsoft Digital Transformation eBook 3: Empower Employees
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Hire, Build, and Train Teams What roles do partners need to staff?
The typical Teams engagement journey can be divided staffing, training, and managing all marketing functions to into Customer Acquisition, Solution Discovery, Solution achieve the sales, growth, profits, and visibility objectives Delivery, and finally Solution Maintenance and Support. while ensuring a consistent marketing message and There are various roles aligned with these phases that are positioning consistent with the corporate direction. critical to their practice. In smaller practices, two or more The Digital Marketing Manager plays a major role in of the roles can be performed by one person. However, it enhancing brand awareness within the digital spaces as is important to ensure that all the appropriate skillsets are well as driving online traffic to their website and acquiring present in their staff. leads/customers. This position plans and executes all digital marketing, including SEO/SEM, marketing MARKETING ROLES database, email, mobile, social media and display Marketing is a critical part of a successful Teams practice. advertising campaigns. It is also responsible for improving Partners who invest in marketing resources succeed to a the usability, design, content, ranking and conversion of far greater degree than those who don’t. The Marketing the company website. They must remain up to-date with team is responsible for defining and bringing the solution the latest trends and best practices in online marketing, and services to market, as well as developing lead analytics and measurement. generation activities to create a sales pipeline. The The Content Marketer is pivotal to generating inbound following key roles should be considered for their Teams leads through writing authoritative, thought-leadership practice. content. This position is responsible for content creation The Marketing Leader is responsible for driving and delivery, tracking metrics that influence content marketing strategy, tactics, campaigns and programs to strategy and collaborating with both technical and subject produce top-line results that raise brand awareness, matter specialists to produce relevant content that meets recognition, and loyalty for their company and the Teams the needs of their audiences. They must be an exemplary offerings. This position is tasked with demand generation writer who can communicate their company’s tone and and marketing funnel optimization using brand, mission with clean, concise, well-polished copy and advertising, creative, digital, field and channel marketing. produce blogs, eBooks, whitepapers, infographics, guides, The Head of Marketing shapes and directs the company’s articles and even audio and video content. This position go-to-market vision and works cross functionally to will also know how to blog and communicate effectively ensure the right mix of offerings, positioning and price. to an online audience. This position is also responsible for planning, organizing, aka.ms/practiceplaybooks HIRE AND TRAIN PAGE 99
The Graphic Designer is responsible for the creation, comprised of pre-sales technical resources, delivery team maintenance and updating of visual marketing assets in members and senior leaders. both print and digital media to support their brand and The Business Development Representative (BDR) marketing goals. This position manages all phases of the reports to the Sales Leader and is responsible for the full design process including concepting, mock-up sales lifecycle, from qualification through closure and production, review and integration, and finished product. renewal. The BDR focuses primarily on acquiring new The graphic designer is responsible for solving problems cloud customers within designated industry verticals, when it comes to design aesthetic for presentations, leveraging a repeatable remote sales motion. This role collateral materials, event and trade show graphics, also works closely with corporate marketing resources to website design, blogs, webinars, demos, emails and digital execute demand generation programs and continuously campaigns, social media assets and more. improve and refine sales assets and artefacts. SALES ROLES The Customer Development Representative (CDR) reports to the Sales Leader and is responsible for upselling They have a vision for developing the next great cloud and cross-selling new cloud solutions and services to solution or building a great Teams based provider existing customers, as well as all contract renewals. The business, but even the best products and ideas need a CDR works closely with marketing to introduce and sell sales strategy to gain maximum market traction. Consider Next-Best- Offer (NBO) “waves” within a designated hiring for the following sales positions for broad reach. industry vertical, through an accelerated remote sales The Sales Leader applies their expertise in selling motion. This role also works closely with the support strategies and methodologies, and execution to achieve organization to assist in resolving outstanding issues with defined revenue objectives. This role is responsible for strategic accounts, creating, leading and directing a high-performance sales The Customer Success Manager is responsible for team that achieves revenue, profitability and MRR targets driving consumption of cloud services and identifying while consistently delivering customer value. The Sales new opportunities for customers to leverage their Teams Leader manages the hiring, onboarding and investment and the broader Microsoft 365 platform to compensation plans of new and existing sales team derive business value. The CSM orchestrates and drives a members and develops sales strategies that both proactive selling motion into the existing client base. accelerate new customer acquisition and deepen existing Primary responsibilities include developing long-term customers relationships. The Sales Leader also works relationships within a portfolio of strategic clients, closely with corporate marketing to ensure a seamless aligning customer business needs with technology end-to-end customer acquisition business process. A solutions and helping clients bridge the IT/business gap. bachelor’s degree with a business concentration is required. An MBA is preferred for this role, along with SOLUTION DELIVERY seven to ten years of experience in a sales leadership role. The Pre-Sales Cloud Solution Engineer supports the The Account Executive (AE) is responsible for proactively Account Executive, Business Development Representative identifying target accounts and acquiring new customers. and Customer Development Representative in driving The role accurately qualifies both self- and marketing- their active sales pursuits. The PCSE reports to the Sales generated leads, defines deal strategy, manages and Leader and is responsible for facilitating both remote and guides all resources supporting the sales pursuit, manages onsite prospect discovery sessions, defining cloud solution sales costs and accurately forecasts revenue and close fit and working with the delivery team to develop cloud dates. The Account Executive establishes executive solution recommendations, scope clarity, and accurate relationships and actively works with prospects to develop project services estimates. This role also works closely with quantifiable project business cases. This role effectively corporate marketing and product management to informs, guides and manages a broader sales pursuit team identify new cloud solution development and packaged services opportunities (IP). aka.ms/practiceplaybooks HIRE AND TRAIN PAGE 100
The Functional Consultant is at the core of configuring ONGOING SUPPORT and implementing the system. This person is not If their practice offers ongoing solution maintenance and necessarily an expert on industry processes but is deeply support, they will need to invest in resources to support knowledgeable on the technical aspects of solution this function to ensure that their organization continues implementation. This role is typically trained from with strong ongoing support for existing customers. graduate or industry hires and experience ranges from 6 months to 10 years. The technical consultant requires The User Support Specialist assists customers who are deep Teams training and should be skilled at the having technical issues with their product, or who need subsequent lifecycle management required to ensure help realizing the full benefit of their solution. They will continued use of the service. likely help customers navigate the operational challenges of cloud computing. Thoroughly training them on both The Solution Architect sets the high-level direction and their product, and the infrastructure on which it is built, is blueprint for implementation and is brought in at critical paramount to their success, and ultimately, their milestones. Typically, a solution architect is a former customers’ satisfaction. Qualifications include technical functional consultant who has since become more support experience and great communication and technical and tenured. This is a senior role that usually interpersonal skills (soft skills). Experience with cloud requires 10-20 years of implementation experience. They technologies is a major plus. should also have an understanding of the entire Microsoft 365 stack of products. SCALING THEIR PROJECT TEAM The Developer is brought in if there are extensions to The size of their project team can vary widely based on third-party systems to be made or coding is necessary. the size of their customer and the complexity of their Developer skills are usually aligned to Teams project. A typical team might comprise a project manager, development. This role typically requires at least 5 years of architect, and between 1 and 3 additional consultants. developer experience. An effective Teams developer These roles can scale up for larger projects by adding knows how to modify systems, do code reviews, has a additional consultants or developers as required. Roles developer pedigree, and can also talk to clients. can also scale down for small projects by combining roles The Project Manager ensures deadlines are met, for the delivery of the solution. More complex projects will manages the day-to-day workflows and roadmap. This require role specialization – for example, if the scope role typically requires PMP certification and experience as covers IoT, AI or other integration services the project may a project manager. call for verticalized technical roles. The Change Management Consultant drives the people Larger projects may also require additional roles than and process part of the digital transformation. Accelerated described here. For instance, customers that have a larger value comes from executive sponsorship, stakeholder user base, or deployment in multiple countries or a heavy engagement, alignment of technology with both the customized mobile application might need a Release business strategy and processes, and readiness. This role Manager and different QA/Test professionals on the team. typically has a background in business consulting or Customer complexity will drive which skills need business process management, along with Change prioritization. Consider building their practice following a Management certification, from organizations such as progressive complexity path. Start with basic projects Prosci®. (single geography, focus on one sales play), evolving to customers that require higher customizations, and then moving onto customers that need to redefine or build complex business processes from the ground up. Customers add complexity with geographic coverage, and users from different geographies can impact solution performance and different mobile user requirements. aka.ms/practiceplaybooks HIRE AND TRAIN PAGE 101
Start with one region/district geography before adding meet those standards. This role also manages internal multiple regions/districts or countries. Technical skills tools such as Microsoft 365, Azure DevOps, testing tools, requirements to successfully implement a multiple- and 3rd party ISV approved applications. country customers are higher than single-country The Chief Operating Officer (COO) owns the implementations. organizational structure and methodology for solution Another aspect to consider is the focus on development and delivery. This role is also responsible for functional/industry scope versus the technical scope. management and leadership training across the There are many partners in the ecosystem that focus only organization. on supporting other partners on the technical configuration/implementation model. Based on that, keeping a strong functional team specialized on vertical industries while outsourcing the technical work is also a practice to be considered.
TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP ROLES Consider the following technical management positions if their solution delivery effort will involve eight or more technical staff. In smaller teams, senior-level employees (e.g., lead consultant, lead architect) sometimes take on management duties along with their other responsibilities, removing the need for dedicated managers. The Chief Technical Officer (CTO) manages technical readiness through identification of needs/requirements. This role works with HR to understand best-fit career paths for their technical staff, sets standards for skills and certifications, and orchestrates the delivery of training to
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Recruiting Resources Top 10 Sources to Find Skilled Labor and What to Look For
Sourcing skilled labor can be a challenge. In the Microsoft Hiring and Onboarding Playbook Study, referrals (63%), website (57%) and LinkedIn (56%) were reported as the top approaches for generating leads.
Top Candidate Lead Sources Total (n=275)
Referrals from employees or partnerships 63%
Posting on website 57%
LinkedIn 56%
Social media 42%
Former employees 36%
University recruiting 36%
Local technical communities 35%
Recruit from competitors 23%
Meetups 16%
Recruitment agency 4%
Other 4%
Source: Microsoft Hiring and Onboarding Playbook Study, MDC Research, June 2018
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Job Descriptions
The following tables provides detailed job descriptions they can utilize to hire the key technical resources. All technical skills, non-technical skills, certifications, and technologies listed are potential items a candidate should have, but no candidate will have all the items listed.
Sales Leader
The Sales Leader applies their expertise in selling strategies and methodologies, strategic planning and execution to achieve defined revenue objectives. This role is responsible for creating, leading and directing a high-performance sales team that achieves revenue, profitability and MRR targets while consistently delivering customer value. The Sales Leader manages the hiring, onboarding and compensation plans of new and existing sales team members and develops sales strategies that both accelerate new customer acquisition and deepen existing customers relationships. The Sales Leader also works closely with corporate marketing to ensure a seamless end-to-end customer acquisition business process.
• Top Qualities: Demonstrates strong motivational and leadership skills. Ability to think creatively. Deep understanding of sales best practices. • Previous Roles: VP Sales, Sales Manager. • Certifications: Defined / corporate sales methodology.
• Define optimized selling motions that align with the Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 solution set and target market. • Understand the key business drivers within the focus vertical/industry. • Accurately forecast revenue and close dates. Strategic Capabilities • Effectively motivate sales team members. • Collaborate with marketing and delivery leaders to execute comprehensive customer acquisition, retention and extension strategies. • Strong objection handling and closing skills. • Excellent negotiating skills
• Develop plans and strategies to meet or exceed the company’s revenue target. • Develop a scalable sales process and drive sales team compliance. • Determine and assign sales quotas, targets, and goals. • Support complex sales negotiations, attend sales presentations and help close strategic deals. • Directly manage large, high-profile customer accounts, (when appropriate). • Work collaboratively with marketing to develop lead and revenue generation programs and create high impact sales collateral. Execution Skills • Set targets, performance plans and objective for all sales team members. • Review sales team members performance, progress, and targets. • Coach sales professionals to drive continuous improvement. • Recruit, select, onboard, and train new sales professionals. • Create motivating compensation plans and incentives. • Monitor competitive and market activity. Provide feedback and recommendations to the executive team. • Ensure CRM system accurately reflects all customer and new business opportunities.
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• Working knowledge of the Microsoft cloud platform and Microsoft 365 (or Microsoft Teams) capabilities. Technologies • Feature / Function knowledge of relevant Microsoft 365 solution set. • Working understanding of competitive sales strategies.
Certifications • Sales cycle methodology or equivalent training.
• A bachelor’s degree with a business concentration is required. An MBA is preferred. • Seven to 10 years of experience in a sales leadership role. • A minimum of four years of experience in a selling role and at least two years of experience working Experience with sales technology, CRM systems and social media tools. Types/Qualities • Verifiable track record of quota attainment. • Exceptional leadership, communication and interpersonal skills. • Strong leadership and decision-making capabilities.
Account Executive (AE)
The Account Executive is responsible for proactively identifying target accounts and acquiring new customers. The role accurately qualifies both self and marketing generated leads, defines deal strategy, manages and guides all resources supporting the sales pursuit, responsibly manages sales costs and accurately forecasts revenue and close dates. The Account Executive establishes executive relationships and actively works with prospects to develop quantifiable project business cases. This role effectively informs, guides and manages a broader sales pursuit team comprised of pre- sales technical resources, delivery team members and senior leaders.
• Top Qualities: Business acumen / understanding of key prospect business drivers and processes. Consistent quota achievement. Strong networking and lead generation. • Previous Roles: Account Executive, Account Manager, Business Development, Pre-Sales Support, relevant role within the target vertical(s). • Certifications: Defined / corporate sales methodology.
• Understand and execute a defined selling methodology: sales cycle planning and execution through closing to project team hand-off. • Understand the key business drivers within the focus vertical/industry. • Understand the internal and external pressures that affect customer priorities: • Understand enterprise fiscal and budgeting cycles, organization structures and capital prioritization processes. • Clearly communicate partner differentiation and potential business impact to all stakeholders influencing the decision process. Strategic Capabilities • Develop and defend a business case. • Strong verbal (telephone), written and presentation communication skills. • Develop and execute sales strategies and defined sales plays. • Accurately forecast opportunity scope, revenue and close date. • Strong collaboration skills: work with internal pre-sales and delivery colleagues to execute a comprehensive win strategy. • Strong objection handling and sales closing skills. • Ability to determine win probability (knowing when to disengage). • Excellent negotiating skills
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• Develop a networking and prospecting plan across the defined industry or vertical, relevant groups and associations, industry influencers, and potential technology partners. • Plan and execute field-level marketing campaigns. • Understand and align with the internal corporate marketing message and marketing plan. • Conduct accurate due diligence (discovery) with technical, operational and strategic project stakeholders. Execution Skills • Align Microsoft Teams solution capabilities and partner IP features / functions with customer business challenges and desired business outcomes. • Create and facilitate effective business value discussions, presentations and proposals to prospect business leaders. • Clear understanding of common RFI/RFP selection processes (and disruptive techniques). • Co-develop customer business cases to support project approval and funding.
• Working knowledge of the Microsoft cloud platform and Microsoft 365 (or Microsoft Teams) Technologies capabilities. • Feature / Function knowledge of relevant Microsoft Teams solution set.
• Business degree or equivalent (MBA is desirable). • Sales cycle methodology or equivalent training. Certifications • Executive engagement/communications training. • Presentation delivery training.
• 5+ years B2B sales experience (Account Executive, Business Development, Pre-Sales Support). Experience • Verifiable track record of quota attainment and project success. Types/Qualities • Previous focus industry/vertical expertise. • Strong leadership and decision-making capabilities.
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Business Development Representative (BDR)
The Business Development Representative (BDR) reports to the Sales Leader and is responsible for the full sales lifecycle, from qualification through to closure, and renewal. The BDR focuses primarily on acquiring new cloud customers within designated industry verticals, leveraging a repeatable remote sales motion. This role also works closely with corporate marketing resources to execute demand generation programs and continuously improve and refine sales assets and artifacts.
• Top Qualities: Tenacious. Strong networking and lead generation. Consistent sales process compliance. Consistent quota achievement. Excellent communicator. • Previous Roles: Business Development, Pre-Sales Support, Customer Support, relevant role within the focus industry/vertical. • Certifications: Defined / corporate sales methodology, desktop productivity (with focus on CRM).
• Facilitate an accelerated remote selling motion: from lead qualification through to project team hand- off. • Understand the key business drivers and business processes within the focus vertical/industry. • Clearly communicate partner differentiation and project business impact to all stakeholders influencing the decision process. • Exceptional communication skills (written, verbal, and presentation). Strategic Capabilities • Accurately forecast opportunity scope, revenue and close date. • Strong objection handling and closing skills. • Demonstrate a high level of business acumen and literacy. • Solution demonstration skills (light). • Highly organized and able to stay on target while performing a variety of critical short, medium- and long-term tasks daily.
• Create differentiation through memorable first impressions. • Develop and maintain a high level of industry competence and knowledge. • Accurately triage, profile and qualify new prospects. • Develop/manage active pipeline of qualified SMB (small and medium business) opportunities • Engage with all prospect stakeholder levels (tactical, operational and leadership). • Facilitate business case discovery and ROI/payback discussions with prospect stakeholders. Execution Skills • Leverage intelligent discovery to identify business pains and business process challenges. • Clearly articulate the business and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) benefits of cloud, SaaS and subscription-based solutions. • Remotely deliver brief solution demonstrations, presentations and close transactions without physically meeting customers. • Excellent ability to interface remotely with clients & handle multiple priorities concurrently.
• Working knowledge of full Office 365 suite & related productivity applications (Teams, Skype, etc.). Technologies • Strong working knowledge of CRM and lead generation social selling tools (Hub Spot, LinkedIn, Adobe Marketo, etc.).
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent expertise and 3+ years sales experience in a business-to- Certifications business environment. • B2B sales methodology.
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• Industry or vertical experience. Experience • Self-motivated, ability to work independently. • High degree of emotional intelligence. Types/Qualities • Ability to learn and adapt in a rapidly evolving environment. • Desire to make a difference.
Customer Development Representative (CDR)
The Customer Development Representative (CDR) reports to the Sales Leader and is responsible for upselling and cross-selling new cloud solutions to existing customers, as well as all contract renewals. The CDR works closely with marketing to introduce and sell Next- Best-Offer (NBO) “waves” within a designated industry vertical, through an accelerated remote sales motion. This role also works closely with the support organization to assist in resolving outstanding issues with strategic accounts.
• Top Qualities: Tenacious. Strong networking and lead generation. Sales process compliance. Consistent quota achievement. Excellent communicator. • Previous Roles: Business Development, Pre-Sales Support, Customer Support, relevant role within the focus industry/vertical. • Certifications: Defined / corporate B2B sales methodology.
• Establish and extend LOB and executive relationships within the customers’ business community. • Understand the key business drivers and business processes within the focus vertical/industry. • Map business challenges to cloud services and solutions. • Exceptional communication skills (written, verbal, and presentation). Strategic • Accurately forecast opportunity scope, revenue and close date. Capabilities • Strong objection handling and closing skills. • Demonstrate a high level of business acumen and literacy. • Solution demonstration skills (light). • Highly organized and able to stay on target while performing a variety of critical short, medium- and long-term tasks daily.
• Engage existing customers to secure renewals and sell additional cloud services. • Develop and maintain a high level of industry competence and knowledge. • Proactively propose incremental cloud and managed service offers that build on customers’ existing technology and cloud services footprint. • Develop and manage an active pipeline of qualified SMB (small and medium business) customer opportunities. Execution Skills • Engage with all prospect stakeholder levels (tactical, operational and leadership). • Facilitate business case discovery and ROI/payback discussions with prospect stakeholders. • Leverage intelligent discovery to identify business pains and business process challenges. • Clearly articulate the business and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) benefits of cloud, SaaS and subscription- based offers. • Remotely deliver brief solution demonstrations, presentations and close transactions without physically meeting customers.
• Working knowledge of full Office 365 suite and related productivity applications (Teams, Skype, etc.). Technologies • Strong working knowledge of CRM and lead generation social selling tools (Hub Spot, LinkedIn, Adobe Marketo, etc.). aka.ms/practiceplaybooks HIRE AND TRAIN PAGE 108
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent expertise and 3+ years sales experience in a business-to-business Certifications environment. • B2B sales methodology.
• Industry or vertical experience. Experience • Self-motivated, ability to work independently. • High degree of emotional intelligence. Types/Qualities • Ability to learn and adapt in a rapidly evolving environment. • Desire to make a difference.
Pre-Sales Cloud Solution Engineer
The Pre-Sales Cloud Solution Engineer supports the Account Executive, Business Development Representative and Customer Development Representative in driving their active sales pursuits. The PCSE reports to the Sales Leader and is responsible for facilitating prospect both remote and onsite prospect discovery sessions, defining cloud solution fit and working with the delivery team to develop accurate cloud solution recommendations, scope clarity and accurate project services estimates. This role also works closely with corporate marketing and product management to identify new cloud solution development and packaged services opportunities (IP).
• Top Qualities: Understand customer requirements and business challenges. Effectively communicate solution value. Detail oriented. Analytical, problem-solving orientation. • Previous Roles: Pre-sales support, business analyst, project delivery, customer support and/or relevant role within the focus industry/vertical. • Certifications: Demo2Win or equivalent training. B2B sales methodology.
• Translate technology jargon and technical requirements into business language. • Ability to explain complex cloud solutions (and architectures) in simple terms. • Establish relationships with both LOB IT stakeholders during active sales cycles. Demonstrate a high level of business acumen and literacy. • Develop and maintain a high level of industry competence and knowledge. Understand the key business drivers and business processes within the focus vertical/industry. Strategic • Map business challenges to cloud services and solutions. • Exceptional discovery skills. Capabilities • Strong solution design capabilities • Strong solution demonstration skills. • Exceptional communication skills (written, verbal, and presentation). • Highly organized. Able to prioritize a variety of critical short, medium- and long-term tasks for multiple sales pursuits. • Identify and determine impact of both functional gaps, as well as technical gaps and project risks
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• Actively support the opportunity profiling and qualification process. • Prioritize and manage support activities for an active pipeline of prospect and customer opportunities. • Engage with all prospect stakeholder levels (tactical, operational and leadership). • Accurately identify business case and ROI elements. • Leverage intelligent discovery to identify business pains and business process challenges. Execution Skills • Collaborate with project delivery to define customer solutions. • Prepare and deliver cloud solution demonstrations, both onsite and remotely. • Continually refresh and update Microsoft Teams and Microsoft cloud service solution knowledge. • Support the development of RFI/RFP submissions. • Actively support prospect cloud solution trials, pilots and POCs.
• Working knowledge of full Office 365 suite and related productivity applications (Teams, Skype, etc.). Technologies • Strong working knowledge of CRM and lead generation social selling tools (Hub Spot, LinkedIn, Adobe Marketo). • Microsoft 365 or equivalent certifications.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineer or computer security or equivalent expertise Certifications and 3+ years of sales or customer support experience in a business-to-business environment. • Demo2Win or equivalent solution demonstration training.
• 5+ years industry or vertical experience. Experience • Self-motivated, ability to work independently. Types/Qualities • High degree of emotional intelligence. • Ability to facilitate/whiteboard solution discovery and design sessions.
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Customer Success Manager (CSM)
The Customer Success Manager is responsible for driving successful adoption and expansion of Microsoft Teams workloads within their accounts. Primary responsibilities include developing long-term relationships within a portfolio of strategic clients, aligning customer business needs with Microsoft technology solutions and helping customers bridge the IT/business gap.
This role is also responsible for managing the day-to-day client relationships, and facilitating the development of the appropriate technical, operational and strategic relationships necessary to develop a deep and broad business partnership.
The CSM will collaboratively drive change management and adoption activities with key Business Decision Makers, help reduce implementation risk, drive usage of existing workloads, and identify opportunities in her/his accounts. The CSM is also a key part of our customer facing sales teams and will be called on frequently to leverage their deep knowledge of CRM or ERP to support sales growth.
• Top Qualities: Business acumen; compelling people skills; project management skills • Previous Roles: Account Management, Change Management Consulting, Business Consulting • Certifications: Business Degree (BA or MBA), Change Management
• Deep understanding of SaaS customer engagement • Understand core business drivers within each customer industry or vertical. • Proven ability to map the customer’s business process to product capability • Experience in driving CRM or ERP transformation in enterprises through effective change Strategic management and adoption highly preferred • Accurately segments and prioritizes the customer portfolio by opportunity and need. Capabilities • Understand internal and external pressures that affect customer priorities • Proactively identifies and surfaces new technology or business solutions that support strategic customer objectives and/or address customer challenges. • Collaborates and engages with internal project and delivery colleagues to identify and position ongoing next wave sales opportunities.
• Build, maintain and leverage strong relationships with Business Decision Makers (BDMs) and IT Decision Makers (ITDMs) within each customer to influence solution adoption, create strong support for new opportunities, secure willingness to advocate on behalf of the solution/project • Ability to drive change throughout a customer’s organization including managing communications and training for varieties of stakeholder groups • Create value for customers by ensuring they clearly define business outcomes and then build a “success plan” with the appropriately identified objectives, stakeholders, milestones, risks and metrics needed to achieve them • Facilitate strategic planning workshops with customers Execution Skills • Proactively identify new workloads and expansion opportunities in each account to drive value both for the customer and partner • Connect features / functions to customers’ desired business outcomes. • Co-develop customer business cases to support project approval and funding. • Build/maintain rapid channel of communication to customer in case of online service-related issues and events • Create, maintain and execute strategic account plans for each customer account: o plans contemplate customers’ value chain, eco-system, internal/external business drivers, key customers and suppliers. o plans contemplate a staged or wave approach to identifying and recommending the “next- best project.” aka.ms/practiceplaybooks HIRE AND TRAIN PAGE 111
o plans reflect account-based marketing approach across prioritized customer accounts.
• Working knowledge of the Microsoft cloud platform and Microsoft 365 (or Microsoft Teams) Technologies capabilities. • Feature / Function knowledge of relevant Microsoft Teams solution set.
• Business degree or equivalent (MBA desirable). • Certification in Organizational Change Management. Certifications • Executive engagement/communications training. • Presentation delivery training.
• 3+ years B2B sales experience (Account Executive, Business Development, Pre-Sales Support, Experience Project Delivery). Types/Qualities • Previous industry/vertical expertise. • Strong orchestration and relationship development skills.
Change Management Consultant
As a Change Management Consultant, they will be a key leader in working with our customers to drive the people and process side of digital transformations. Accelerating value realization for customers requires a deep understanding of not only business strategy and process, but also how organizations respond to and adapt to change.
The Change Consultant will work with executives and business leaders at large organizations in a variety of industries to drive effective change programs aligned with our business solutions. They will secure executive sponsorship, engage with key stakeholders and ensure that the solution is developed in ways that effectively meet business strategy and stakeholders needs, while overcoming inertia and delivering sustainable results.
Theirr contributions will include strategic engagement with executives, business process management, and stakeholder alignment, communications and readiness.
• Top Qualities: Business acumen; compelling people skills; project management skills • Previous Roles: Change Management Consulting, Business Consulting, Business Process Management • Certifications: Change Management, Business Degree (BA or MBA)
• Understand core business drivers within each customer industry or vertical. Strategic Capabilities • Understand internal and external pressures that affect customer priorities • Strong verbal (telephone), written and presentation communication skills.
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• Experience in leading change management frameworks and methods • Ability to network within and across customer accounts to broaden the contact base, specifically within LOB and senior leadership. • Facilitates strategic planning workshops with customers • Conducts accurate due diligence (discovery) with technical, operational and strategic project Execution Skills stakeholders. • Connects features / functions to customers’ desired business outcomes. • Experience driving change throughout a customer’s organization including managing communications and training for varieties of stakeholder groups • Project management • Excellent written and verbal presentation skills
• Working knowledge of the Microsoft cloud platform and Microsoft Teams (or Microsoft 365) Technologies capabilities. • Feature / Function knowledge of relevant Microsoft Teams solution set.
• Business degree or equivalent (MBA desirable). • Certification in Organizational Change Management. Certifications • Executive engagement/communications training. • Presentation delivery training.
• 3+ years of experience in change management and business consulting Experience • Experience with c-level, stakeholder management, communications, and training programs Types/Qualities • Previous industry/vertical expertise. • Strong orchestration and relationship development skills.
Marketing Leader
The Marketing Leader is responsible for driving marketing strategy, tactics, campaigns and programs to produce top-line results that raise brand awareness, recognition, and loyalty for the company and the broader Microsoft 365 offerings. This position is tasked with demand generation and marketing funnel optimization using brand, advertising, creative, digital, field and channel marketing. The Marketing Leader shapes and directs the company’s go-to-market vision and works cross functionally to ensure the right mix of offerings, positioning and price. This position is also responsible for planning, organizing, staffing, training, and managing all marketing functions to achieve the company’s sales, growth and profitability objectives, while ensuring consistent global marketing messaging and positioning that is consistent with the corporate direction.
• Top Qualities: Excellent strategic, analytical and leadership skills. Creative and entrepreneurial spirit. • Previous Roles: Vice President of Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Marketing • Certifications: Bachelor’s degree in Business, Arts, Engineering and/or Sciences. An advanced degree in marketing or business (MBA) is preferred.
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• Spearhead the planning, development and execution of the organization’s marketing strategy and go-to- market vision. • Oversee the implementation of all marketing strategies over the full marketing lifecycle: inclusive of campaign and program design, execution, monitoring, optimization and analysis. • Deep demand generation focus to strategically grow a customer base and maximizing online revenue generation opportunities across multiple channels. • Increase sales revenue through traditional and digital marketing activities including creative Strategic design, content creation and management, marketing automation, customer and campaign analytics, e-commerce, and web, search, email, social and mobile marketing. Capabilities • Manage the “voice of the customer” • Ability to monitor and interpret competitive research to inform product and services adjustments, as well as opportunity identification. • Ensure marketing KPIs align with and support both organizational and operational objectives. • Prioritize and manage marketing budgets to ensure maximum ROI. • Lead and mentor a high-performing, highly collaborative marketing team across multiple functions: brand, digital, social media and creative, channel and field marketing, advertising and PR.
• Successful track record building and managing multi-functional marketing teams. Ability to motivate and inspire marketing team members. • Possesses exceptional verbal and written communication skills as well as strong and persuasive Execution Skills presentation abilities. • Ability to network and effectively leverage professional contacts. • Drives the daily execution and enhancement of the company’s overall marketing strategy. Delivers measurable results within a defined budget.
• Exceptional knowledge of marketing principles, techniques, technologies and platforms. Technologies • Working knowledge of marketing automation, SEO, social and content management tools. • Deep understanding of CRM and lead management tools (HubSpot, Pardot, Adobe Marketo, etc.).
• 8+ plus years B2B marketing experience; previous senior management or executive positions in technology and/or related industries. Certifications • Highly collaborative leader with 5+ years people management experience. • International marketing experience is preferred.
Experience • Industry/vertical marketing expertise. • Action-orientation, with the desire and ability to get things done. Strong sense of urgency. Types/Qualities • Effective collaboration and influencing capabilities.
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Digital Marketing Manager
The Digital Marketing Manager plans and executes all digital marketing activities, including SEO/SEM, marketing technology, email, mobile, social media and display advertising campaigns. This position plays a major role in enhancing brand awareness within the digital arenas and drives online traffic to their website that lead to best-in-class customer acquisition. The Digital Marketing Manager is also responsible for improving the usability, design, content, ranking and conversion of the company website. Additionally, they oversee and influence the social media strategy by creating and managing the social profile and presence, monitoring online conversations and sentiment and creating content for social channels. This role must relentlessly stay current with the latest trends and best practices in online marketing, analytics and measurement.
• Top Qualities: Strategic and analytical thinker. Innovative and adaptable. • Previous Roles: Digital Marketer, Digital Marketing Manager, Social Media Manager/Specialist, SEO Manager/Specialist • Certifications: Bachelor’s degree in Business, Arts, Engineering and/or Sciences; Certifications: Google Analytics and AdWords, HubSpot and Hootsuite.
• Proven track record managing an organization’s digital presence, creating content for digital, social and mobile channels, engaging in social listening and monitoring online conversation and brand mention that drive an enhanced customer experience. • Deep experience generating new leads, specifically marketing qualified leads (MQL), by converting site traffic through calls-to-action, landing pages, and lead generation content (including offers). • Excellent verbal and digital communication skills. Proficiency in all social channels, as well as experience with public relations or public brand management. Strategic • Optimization of marketing automation and lead nurturing processes through email, content, and social channels. Capabilities • Establish closed-loop analytics with sales to understand how inbound marketing activities convert into customers. Continuously refine the customer engagement and conversion process. • Experience with improving organic and paid search rankings and results (SERP and SEM), conducting keyword research, making technical SEO recommendations, designing site architecture, and analyzing and applying metrics on website and keyword performance. • Deep experience driving reach, engagement, and advocacy in social media via organic content, paid ads, and influencers to acquire more followers on social channels. • Collaborate with inbound marketing and blog contributors to maximize joint content development efforts
• Strategic results orientation with a proven track record of strong tactical execution. • Meaningful experience with data-driven SEO analysis and optimization; as well as hands on knowledge of SEO tools, email marketing, lead nurturing, marketing automation, and/or web analytics. • Possesses an active and well-rounded personal presence on social media, with a command of each Execution Skills network and their best practices. • Highly analytical with an ability to use both data and intuition to inform decisions; can derive meaning from data through A/B testing and email optimization. • Strong written, oral and visual communication skills. • Proven ability to manage projects involving both internal staff and external agencies.
• Thorough knowledge of search ranking, optimization factors and key algorithm updates. Technologies • Deep proficiency in SEO optimization tools, Google and other web analytics, and keyword tools • Experience with content and email management tools, and marketing automation technology aka.ms/practiceplaybooks HIRE AND TRAIN PAGE 115
• Working knowledge of Office 365 and related productivity apps, with deep knowledge of CRM and Lead Management tools (HubSpot, Pardot, Adobe Marketo, etc.).
• BA/BS degree or equivalent work experience. Certifications • 3-5 years’ digital marketing experience at an agency or B2B technology brand with proven examples of digital / social strategies and execution.
Experience • Industry/vertical experience • Analytical ability and can use data to inform all decisions Types/Qualities • Innovative and adaptable
Content Marketer
The Content Marketer is pivotal to generating inbound leads through writing authoritative, thought-leadership content. This position is responsible for strategizing and executing content creation and delivery, tracking metrics that influence content strategy, and collaborating with both technical and subject matter specialists to produce relevant content that engages the emotions of their target audiences. They must be an exemplary writer who can clearly communicate their company’s tone and mission with clean, concise copy. The Content Marketer is responsible for producing blogs, eBooks, whitepapers, infographics, guides and articles, as well as audio and video content. This position must also know how to blog and effectively communicate to an online audience.
• Top Qualities: Excellent communicator and storyteller. Experimental and curious. Analytical and precise. Results driven. • Previous Roles: Content Marketer, Copywriter, Editor, Corporate Communications, Inbound Marketing. • Certifications: Bachelor’s degree in Business, Arts, Engineering and/or Sciences.
• Deep understanding of, and ability to, strategize and execute content creation and delivery. • Channel management of digital content hubs and all supporting social channels, including email / newsletter distribution. • Knowledge of inbound content best practices and all business relevant social media channels and/or platforms. • Experience driving inbound traffic, prospect/customer engagement and qualified lead generation • Ability to work with, and produce compelling content for, sales to improve lead quality and with support to improve customer retention. Strategic • Ability to drive collaboration, planning and measurement of inbound campaigns and programs across internal stakeholder groups. Capabilities • Ability to build and manage a rich content/editorial calendar that attracts a qualified audience to defined digital properties (inclusive of blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, reports, webinars, infographics, etc.). • Ability to optimize marketing automation and lead nurture processes across digital and social channels. • Clear understanding of, and experience tracking, metrics that influence content strategy to ensure optimal ROI. • Excellent writing and editing skills. Experience with editorial governance over brand voice, style and tone.
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• Collaborate across functions and silos to deliver an effective content marketing strategy and editorial plan that addresses primary business objectives at the lowest possible cost. • Strong project management skills. Ability to lead all stages of content development from ideation through execution and implementation. Execution Skills • Ability to deliver measurable results across multiple channels relating to increased engagement, lead generation and sales execution. • Strong understanding of SEO and Google Analytics to optimize content creation. • Ability to engage and maintain connections with social audiences. • Editorial mindset with an ability to predict audience preferences and buyer behaviors.
• Expertise in marketing and social media automation platforms and content management tools such as WordPress, as well as email marketing tools such as Constant Contact, MailChimp etc. Technologies • Understanding of SEO, keywords and Google analytics. • Working knowledge of Microsoft Office365 and related productivity apps, with deep knowledge of CRM and Lead Management tools (HubSpot, Pardot, Adobe Marketo, etc.).
• BA/BS or equivalent working experience. • 3+ plus years B2B marketing experience preferably in technology and/or related industries. Certifications • Best practices around digital, social, inbound and supporting mar-tech, as well as content creation and consumption patterns.
Experience • Industry/vertical experience. • Excellent communicator, storyteller extraordinaire and creative thinker. Types/Qualities • Digital expertise.
Graphic Designer
The Graphic Designer is responsible for the creation, maintenance and updating of visual print and digital media marketing assets to support their brand and marketing goals. This position manages all phases of the design process including concept definition, mock-up production, content review and integration, as well as finished product. The graphic designer is responsible for the design aesthetic for all marketing and sales collateral materials, inclusive of presentations, event and trade show graphics, website design, blog templates, webinars, demos, emails and digital campaigns as well as all video and social media assets.
• Top Qualities: Creative. Clear communicator. Strong time/project management skills. • Previous Roles: Graphic Designer, Art Director, Multimedia Content Creator • Certifications: BA/BS or recognized design certification and/or equivalent working experience.
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• Ability to create and champion the visual brand identity across all marketing channels. • Ability to develop a clear understanding of the product/services brand positioning and messaging. • Experience in articulating designs with a business-driven and brand experience mindset. • Excellent verbal and visual communications skills. • Understanding of the design and production of graphics for digital, website, social media, display ads, and email, as well as traditional print media – including page and microsite layout, animation, Strategic infographics, illustrations, graphics, banners and email templates, for both internal and external Capabilities use. • Manage all design requirements including presentations, signage, and trade show collateral. • Ability to review web applications and visuals, including user interfaces created by both internal stakeholders and external vendors, to ensure alignment to brand standards. • Ability to bring new design and content creation ideas to the broader marketing. • Proficient with new media. Possesses a strong understanding of the integration and use of animation and video to drive prospect and client engagement.
• Ability to generate high-level concepts, from strategic brief through to final execution. • Experience managing all phases of the design process, including concepting, mock-up production, copy creation, review and integration, and finished product review. • Ability to work collaboratively within multiple stakeholder groups that include sales and product Execution Skills development, to identify and address visual requirements for projects and campaigns. • Maintain quality control and responsibility for the integrity of the final deliverables. • Manage the creative process across multiple project priorities and timelines. • Ability to present concepts, communicate ideas, defend ideas to cross-functional project stakeholders.
• Proficiency in graphic design programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. • Working knowledge of full O365 suite with an emphasis on PowerPoin.t Technologies • Video editing (Adobe Premiere Pro) a plus. • Knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript a major plus.
• BA/BS or recognized design certification and/ or 2+ years equivalent working experience. Certifications • Previous experience working as an in-house designer or at a marketing agency. • End user proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite or similar technologies.
• Expert grasp of design fundamentals and trends. Experience • Strong organizational and communication skills. Types/Qualities • Digital expertise. • Acute attention to detail.
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Training Resources For technical staff to function as change agents supporting current and emerging cloud technologies, their buy-in for the use and integration of these technologies is needed.
Partners will need the following:
• An understanding of their roles and any changes to their current position
• Time and resources to explore the technologies RESOURCES: ➔ Training Event in a Box • An understanding of the business case for the technologies ➔ Office 365 Training Center Use the following resources as part of their Teams onboarding for new and existing ➔ Microsoft Learn staff: ➔ Partner Technical Services ➔ Microsoft Partner Network • Training Event in a Box – a downloadable set of Power Points and Demo Training Center Scripts that they can use to train their technical team or their customers.
• Office 365 Training Center provides free, self- paced learning to help them stay current with Office 365.
• Microsoft Learn offers a wide variety of official curriculum on-demand, Microsoft 365 certification preparation courses and helps them learn through hands-on experiences with a broad reach of Microsoft technologies.
• Partner Technical Services provides 1:1 pre-deployment guidance and developer assistance from Microsoft technical consultants to help ensure a successful implementation for their team.
• The Microsoft Partner Network Training Center provides a centralized interface with in-person, virtual and online training opportunities and certification options organized by products, competencies, certifications, and job role
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DEVELOPER FOCUSED TRAINING RESOURCES
Topic Samples & Tutorials
Microsoft Teams Platform Academy https://aka.ms/teamsplatformacademy
Microsoft Teams Developer Platform https://aka.ms/teamsdev
SharePoint Framework http://aka.ms/spfx-training
Graph API https://github.com/microsoftgraph/contoso-airlines-teams-sample
SharePoint Framework – Tutorial https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/training/training
Dev Setup http://bit.ly/SPFx-DevSetup Build your first Web Part http://bit.ly/SPFx-FirstWP SharePoint Framework – Samples SPFx Labs http://bit.ly/SPFx-Labs SP dev solutions: https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev- solutions/tree/master/solutions
SharePoint Framework – First Visit
http://bit.ly/FieldVisitDemo Demo Sample
Office Developer – Hands-on Labs
End to end HR solution with Teams, https://developer.microsoft.com/office/docs#officetraining Power Platform, Bots, and Graph
Line of Business Samples – Airlines, Manufacturing, and Professional Services Contoso HR Talent Application – Hiring process workflow Microsoft Teams – Samples Teams App Templates – Icebreaker, custom stickers app template Contoso HR Talent Application Demo
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Competencies and Certifications Cloud Productivity Competency
Microsoft competencies demonstrate proven expertise in delivering quality solutions in a specialized area of business. Microsoft competencies are designed to be recognizable by prospective customers that partners are qualified to meet their needs.
Achieving a Cloud Productivity competency provides a brand for customers that says that they have been validated by Microsoft as being skilled in delivering solutions and services for Office 365. It's a customer-facing brand. With it, comes many benefits, including access to Partner Technical Services, dev and test licenses and go-to-market services. There are several different competencies available, for example there are separate competency options for Managed Services Providers, Distributors, and Learning Partners. In each case, there are minimum requirements that the partner must meet to qualify for the Silver or Gold competency tiers. These requirements can include active the number of active users, certified staff members, and volume of business. A full list of requirements for the MPN Cloud Productivity competency can be found on the Cloud Productivity site. Other Modern workplace competencies (include Cloud Productivity) related to Office 365 can be found on the Modern Workplace competency site.
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Certifications
Increase readiness and marketability with Microsoft certifications.
There are numerous assessments and certifications their team should consider as motivation for advancing their skills, creating proof points for their practice and enabling them to achieve Microsoft Partner Network Competencies.
Description Prerequisites and Exams
Microsoft 365 Microsoft Teams Administrators Exam: Certified: Teams configure, deploy, and manage Office • MS-700: Managing Microsoft Teams Administrator 365 workloads for Microsoft Teams that Associate focus on efficient and effective collaboration and communication.
Microsoft 365 Microsoft 365 Teamwork Administrators Exams (both required): Certified: Teamwork configure, deploy, and manage Office • MS-300: Deploying Microsoft 365 Teamwork Administrator 365 workloads that focus on efficient and • MS-301: Deploying SharePoint Server Hybrid Associate effective collaboration, such as SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams.
Microsoft 365 Microsoft 365 Enterprise Administrators Prerequisite qualifications (choose one): Certified Enterprise evaluate, plan, migrate, deploy, and • Microsoft 365 Certified: Modern Desktop Administrator manage Microsoft 365 services. Administrator Associate Expert • Microsoft 365 Certified: Teamwork Administrator • Microsoft 365 Certified: Security Administrator Associate • Microsoft 365 Certified: Messaging Administrator Associate • MCSE: Productivity Solutions Expert • Microsoft 365 Certified: Teams Administrator Associate Exams (both required): • MS-100: Microsoft 365 Identity and Services • MS-101: Microsoft 365 Mobility and Security
Microsoft 365 Microsoft 365 Developers design, build, Exam: Certified: Developer test, and maintain applications and • MS-600: Building Applications and Solutions Associate solutions that are optimized for the with Microsoft 365 Core Services productivity and collaboration needs of organizations using Microsoft 365.
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Guide: Hire and Train Leverage the Microsoft resources available in the Hire and Train guide, for details on building a technical team, comprehensive role and job descriptions, and training and readiness resources.
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Microsoft Partner
Operationalize Network Operationalize
Microsoft Teams
aka.ms/practiceplaybooks
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Executive Summary
In the previous section, we reviewed how they should hire, This section also provides guidance on how to operate their train, and equip their staff. In this section, we will guide business, from the infrastructure considerations of sales and them through the steps to operationalize their practice. marketing operations to the key contracts they will want to put in place. We’ll walk them through the options for leveraging their internal use benefits that provide them complimentary Whether they're building products, providing managed software licenses and subscriptions for use within their services, or performing project work for customers, their organization. We’ll show them how to deepen success may be impacted by their ability to manage their relationships with their customer by re-selling Teams as an customer records, their projects, and their support trouble overall package along with their customer offering, tickets. We provide guidance on what tools and systems creating a new revenue stream for their business. they should consider implementing
Implement standardized processes Top 5 things to do Decide on technology infrastructure Put a plan into action. These are the top Claim their internal use benefits 5 things partners should do to get the Set up key contracts and tools momentum going. Establish the customer support process
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Teamwork Assessment Teamwork Assessment enables partners to engage with business and IT leaders to identify customer use cases, create strategic alignment, and define actionable roadmaps that deliver transformational business value. Microsoft 365 Partner Accelerators are a set of activities There are several different ‘Build the Plan’ workshops that they can use to accelerate the customer journey. available, and as the Partner they should choose which is Leveraging these accelerators enables them to facilitate best suited for their client. These are: more productive customer conversations, help their • Teams Adoption Workshop This workshop is customers envision the possibilities with Microsoft 365, designed to assist them in effectively engaging and more efficiently realize customer opportunities. with either the BDM’s responsible for project or There are several Partner Accelerators available, covering change success and or the customer adoption a range of Microsoft services. One such accelerator is the leads. The aim is to build a proactive adoption Teamwork Assessment. strategy. • Solutions Workshop The scope of this WORKSHOP FORMAT engagement is to perform a detailed analysis of Each Teamwork assessment comprises a 3-day workshop, the customer’s current environment, including typically delivered at the client premises. The format of user personas, device and calling + meeting the workshop is as follows: workloads. The objective is to jointly create a customized, prioritized and actionable upgrade • Before the workshop, the partner and client plan to move users to Teams for all workloads. should hold a kick-off meeting to identify the • Calling Workshop, The scope of this executive sponsors and business stakeholders, engagement is to perform a detailed analysis of including IT. The client should also complete a the customer’s current environment, including pre-engagement questionnaire, and practical user personas, device and calling + meeting logistics (venue, dates, times, catering, etc.) workloads. The objective is to jointly create a should be agreed. customized, prioritized and actionable upgrade • The first day of the workshop is called ‘The Art of plan to move users to Teams for all workloads. the Possible’. This provides the client with the • Meeting Workshop The scope of the Meetings opportunity to experience Teams through Workshop is to perform a detailed analysis of the immersive demos, and to discuss the business use customer’s current environment, including Site cases, drive the customer intent, and agree the and Environmental analysis, use case scenario focus areas. discovery, device strategy, networking, and • The second and third days of the workshop are workloads. The objective is to jointly create a called ‘Build the Plan’. This may occur customized, prioritized and actionable immediately after the ‘Art of the Possible’ day or a deployment plan. little later. The goal is to collaborate with the customer to agree the scope and use cases to be addressed, success metrics, communication, training, and other key aspects for a successful delivery plan.
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FUNDING RESOURCES They may be eligible for funding support to complete ➔ Teamwork Assessment Materials Teamwork Assessments with qualifying customers. ➔ Teamwork Assessment Introductory Webinar Funding of up to US$5,000 is available per approved ➔ Teamwork Assessment Deep Dive Webinar engagement. ➔ Teamwork Assessment Accelerator Program The funding process is as follows: They start by ➔ Funding Qualification Requirements nominating customers, then Microsoft validates customer and partner eligibility. They provide a statement to Microsoft from their customer confirming engagement, and funding in approved. After delivery, they up upload their proof of execution (POE) documentation to Microsoft, and once this is approved payment is made within 30 days.
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Implement a Solution Delivery Process The process partners follow in delivering their solution to customers is just as important as the technologies they use to deliver it.
When a Teams project fails, it is most often due to basics SCRUM PROCESS like a lack of cloud technical skills, inadequate fit/gap analysis, poor project governance, or team churn. These The Scrum process works well if they want to track product issues are associated with not having the right people on backlog items (PBIs) and bugs on the Kanban board, or the team and an underdeveloped methodology for break PBIs and bugs down into tasks on a task board. This delivery. process supports the Scrum methodology as defined by the Scrum organization. Tasks in this process support tracking Many project failures are also driven by poor alignment of remaining work only. strategy, executive sponsors, stakeholders, or business processes. Solution delivery processes that include AGILE PROCESS modern change management best practices reduce these risks and accelerate value to customers. Choose Agile when their team uses Agile planning methods, including Scrum, and tracks development and test activities Investing in proper time estimation methods and delivery separately. This process works well if they want to track user processes is critical for success, partner profitability, and stories and bugs on the Kanban board, or track bugs and customer satisfaction. Independent of the methodology tasks on the task board. They can learn more about Agile choices, partners must always drive a short time to value, methodologies at the Agile Alliance. which translates to fewer customizations, better use of standardized business processes, and fast delivery of These two processes both work for developing modern solution modules to users. Teams applications as well as for deployment of Teams. Both processes are also supported in Azure DevOps When it comes to delivering solutions for their Teams (formally Visual Studio Team Services) for tracking the practice, incorporate the processes that best fit their needs project. and their team.
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CREATE REPEATABLE PROCESSES • Identify Mobile usage scenarios and mobile devices requirements as early as possible Repeatable processes make for profitable practices. Use • Provide cost estimates for development, cloud the following example checklist to build their own services, and ongoing maintenance/support checklist to use when executing a new engagement. • Address customer objections to proposed • Hold initial requirements meeting technology and services • Identify product owner/manager(s) • Acquire data (or sample of data) for initial data • Identify executive sponsors of the project assessment and proof of concept development • Ensure the project has clear strategic goals and • Host project artifacts (issues, code, etc.) to share success metrics with internal team and customer (e.g. Visual Studio • Identify key business process owners and Team Services) stakeholders • Follow up with customer and provide status/demos • Ensure that business processes are aligned with on a regular basis (e.g. 2-week sprint) business strategy and stakeholder needs • Ensure customer has communications and readiness • Bind customer ‘s organization and their business plan to address the needs of each stakeholder team processes owners into the QA process • Coordinate a final handoff to customer • Reduce the volume of customizations, as they • Conduct project debrief with customer have a high impact on mobile extensibility • Organize internal project post-mortem • Follow-up meeting to clarify and establish next • Customer conducts acceptance test steps • Execute a progressive deployment strategy, i.e. one • Discuss MVP (minimal viable product) criteria region, several regions, one country, two countries, • Establish development process (Agile, Scrum, etc.) several countries • Identify milestones and tasks; share with customer • Ensure customer has a plan to track progress against success metrics and adoption targets
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Implement Intellectual Property Offerings Consider these tips to if investing in developing IP and begin to monetize domain expertise.
DEFINE THEIR SOLUTION MAINTAIN RIGHTS TO THE IP When we asked partners how they determined what IP As they make the transition from project-based or custom they were going to build, we often got the same answer: services to packaged IP, it is critical to revise their they realized most of their customers were asking for the customer agreements, so they can maintain the IP rights same thing or something very similar. Rather than to the solutions they build. continuing to do high-cost, custom work for every They should engage legal counsel to help them protect customer, they decided to productize what their and maintain ownership of the IP they create. Key to customers were asking for. Bring their sales, marketing, success with IP is effectively defining licenses, contracts technical, and delivery teams together to brainstorm and and terms of use, and acquiring patents if applicable. define what patterns of challenges they are seeing across their customer base. CONSIDER THEIR CHANNEL STRATEGY
DETERMINE WHAT WILL DIFFERENTIATE THEIR One of the advantages of productizing their IP is it opens SOLUTION FROM OTHERS IN THE MARKET the possibility of selling their solution on AppSource or through the Microsoft channel of partners. It is important to think about their differentiation strategy. What is going to make their Teams practice better than other similar practices in the industry?
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Microsoft Licensing Options There are several ways partner can purchase the Microsoft cloud services needed to support customers and their practice.
made monthly through an authorized ISV Royalty Licensing MICROSOFT CLOUD AGREEMENT VIA THE CLOUD Program distributor. SERVICE PROVIDER PROGRAM Microsoft Cloud Agreement (MCA) is a transactional MICROSOFT SERVICES PROVIDER LICENSE licensing agreement for commercial and government AGREEMENT organizations seeking to fully outsource management of Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) is for their cloud services through the Cloud Solution Provider service providers and ISVs who want to license eligible (CSP) program. Microsoft products to host software services and In combination with the value-added services offered by a applications to end customers. SPLA provides the license systems integrator, hosting partner, or born-in-the-cloud rights to host specific Microsoft products monthly for a reseller partner, the CSP program offers an easy way to three-year term, as outlined in the Microsoft Service license the cloud services their customers need. On- Provider Use Rights (SPUR) with pricing based on use rights. premises software and Software Assurance are not available through CSP partners. MICROSOFT ONLINE SUBSCRIPTION AGREEMENT The CSP model keeps partners at the center of the Microsoft Online Subscription Agreement (MOSA) is a customer relationship by providing them with direct transactional licensing agreement for commercial, management of billing, provisioning, and support. government, and academic organizations with one or more users/devices. MOSA works best for organizations that want MICROSOFT ISV ROYALTY LICENSING PROGRAM to subscribe to, activate, provision, and maintain cloud services seamlessly and directly via the web through the Microsoft ISV Royalty Licensing Program is for ISVs who Microsoft Online Subscription Program (MOSP). On- want a convenient way to license Microsoft products and premises software and Software Assurance are not available integrate them into a unified solution. ISVs can then through MOSA. replicate the business solution and distribute a fully- licensed solution to their end users. ISV Royalty (ISVR) For more details on these licensing programs please visit agreements are for a three-year term and payment is https://partner.microsoft.com/licensing/licensing- agreements.
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Create a Presales Environment Defining their presales environment strategy is necessary to drive repeatability, increase win- rates, and accelerate decision making.
There are several options for hosting the presales Microsoft’s Live Drive Application Launcher simplifies the environment. We recommend that they make an early creation of complex demonstrations, and can be found investment in localized demo data and industry-oriented here: https://cdx.transform.microsoft.com/ data to help them reduce cost of sales and accelerate the Keep in mind, some product features are add-ons not purchase cycle. available in trial mode. If they are going to market with solutions that leverages add-on features, they might need TEAMS DEMONSTRATION VS. TRIAL to invest in their own pre-sale’s environment. ENVIRONMENTS There are three licensing options for supporting the pre- Demonstrations and trials can both be leveraged during sale process. their sales cycle, but they each serve very different purposes. Trials are better suited to pre-configured TRIAL ENVIRONMENTS solutions that are consumed with very little (if any) configuration. The trial must already contain the industry If they wish to leverage a trial environment for Teams, or vertical best practices, and these best or optimized they can find information about signing up for and business processes must be obvious to the prospect. Trials managing a trial at are ideally suited for marketing or self-serve driven buying https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoftteams/iw-trial- cycles. teams. Just be aware of how Office 365 is associated with Teams at the tenant and other services that are Solution demonstrations are best suited for sales scenarios provisioned as a part of the Teams environment as in which the recommended solution set is significantly documented in the website above. different from what the prospect is currently uses, and/or there are multiple ways to configure the solution with Teams. Trials can be an effective sales asset if they are driving a highly prescriptive sales cycle and have a solution that has been developed for a very specific industry or vertical. Solution demonstrations are more effective for sales scenarios where they need to limit or control what they want their prospect to see.
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IUR (INTERNAL USER RIGHTS) COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE LICENSED ENVIRONMENT Internal User Rights (IURs) are Office 365 licenses (including Teams) their partner organization has access to In this modality, their organization will license the as part of the benefits of different competency levels in environment, just like a customer would, to support the Microsoft Partner Network. To be eligible, their presales. The environment access can be controlled in a organization needs to be at the Silver or Gold competency granular way and all the labor involved in building demo level. Each competency level has different IURs. data and customer scenarios can be reused from one customer to the next. Most industry-oriented partners Some partners use their IURs for internal operations, but prefer to license their own presales environments as a other partners use the IURs for presales. The IURs productive way to drive repeatability and manage their environments have full feature and functionality coverage, vertical IP. and they don’t expire if they keep their competency requirements updated. PROS CONS PROS CONS Full features and Subscription costs functionality, the license No direct cost associated No demo data or demo Separated administrative what they need in to the environments guidance embedded. process to manage alignment with their go- They need to invest instance, features, Environments don’t to-market strategy initially to build the data updates, security expire if they keep their and demo scenarios Environments don’t competency level expire if they keep updated Add-ons no included in subscription most IURs Integrated to their Integrated to their organization’s tenant, so Limited number of user organization’s tenant, so they can use business licenses they can use business emails and credentials for For global partners, the emails and credentials access IURs can be already in for access Interface can be localized. use by other subsidiaries Interface and data can be Other Microsoft localized technologies are not They can apply a part of the environment different security model and restrict access to the environments They can host their IP and use the environment as part of their OP release process
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Key Contracts and Practice Tools Partners will require a complete set of legal documents to drive compliance, protect their IP, and produce consistent engagement deliverables. They also need a documented process to monitor project progress, in terms of both the project plan and budget.
technical aspects of a project, cost-containment requires a KEY CONTRACTS different set of tools. Leverage the Key Contracts for Practice guide to learn more about developing service level agreements, master GITHUB services agreements, a statement of work, and a mutual GitHub provides the hosted environment for the business non-disclosure agreement. application implementation team to version control and share their source code, notebooks and other artifacts both MICROSOFT TEAMS privately (e.g., internally to a team) and publicly (e.g., an Microsoft Teams should be used for every project for open source project), and collaborate on development collaboration. Create a team for each project and invite projects. the customer in as a guest user to collaborate and track the project. Build as much as possible into that team to OTHER COLLABORATION TOOLS AND FILE demonstrate the value and expandability of Teams. The SHARING lifecycle of a project or duration of a managed services Yammer is an enterprise social network collaboration agreement is critical, especially when leveraging the offering to help teams collaborate and share files with each technology and services they are selling them. other. MICROSOFT PROJECT ONLINE OneDrive for Business is an enterprise file sharing service that is designed for automatic synchronization of files Microsoft Project Online is a flexible online solution for between their computer and the cloud. OneDrive makes it project portfolio management (PPM) and everyday work. easy to share files with their customers or partners. Project Online provides powerful project management Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation capabilities for planning, prioritizing, and managing provides users with the capabilities required for setting up a projects and project portfolio investments — from almost project organization, engaging with customers, project anywhere on almost any device. Project Online can be scheduling and costing, managing and approving time and used by administrators, portfolio managers and viewers, expenses, and closing projects. It is specially targeted to project and resource managers, and team leads and address the needs of a project services-based practice, as it members. is designed for professionals who manage projects and the AZURE DEVOPS associated customer engagement process end-to-end. Microsoft Surface Hub is a Teams-integrated collaborations Azure DevOps provides various tools for tasks like running device, or “meeting room in a box.” In addition to the built- agile teams, providing support for Kanban boards, in team experiences like Teams, Microsoft Office, and handling work item backlogs, scrum boards, source Whiteboard, Microsoft Surface Hub is customizable with a control, continuous integration, and release management. wide array of applications. Universal apps built for Windows Source control functionality provides Git support, which 10 shine on Microsoft Surface Hub, and scale to the large enables integration with GitHub if such integration is screen. They can also connect apps from their personal desired. While Azure DevOps helps to manage the device and drive them from Microsoft Surface Hub.
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Use CRM to Grow Your Business CRM solutions streamline processes and increase profitability in their sales, marketing, and service divisions.
A strong CRM solution is a multifaceted platform where Their sales team will be working with the following everything crucial to developing, improving, and retaining types of records: their customer relationships is stored. Without the support ACCOUNTS: Account records contain information about the of an integrated CRM solution, they may miss growth companies they do business with. opportunities and lose revenue because they’re not maximizing their business relationships. Imagine CONTACTS: Contact records contain information about the misplacing customer contact information, only to learn people they know and work with. Usually, multiple contacts their delay pushed their client into the arms of a are associated with one account. Contacts could include competitor. Or, picture their top two salespeople pursuing people responsible for making purchasing decisions or the same prospect, resulting in an annoyed potential paying invoices, support technicians, or anyone they work customer and some unfriendly, in-house competition. with at the company. Without a centralized program where their people can log LEADS: Leads are potential sales, and they or their company and track customer interactions, they will lose out on can get leads from many different sources. For example, valuable sales opportunities. they can generate sales leads from marketing campaigns, inquiries from their website, mailing lists, social media posts, THE FUNDAMENTALS OF CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP or in person at a conference or trades convention. MANAGEMENT OPPORTUNITIES: When they qualify a lead, it becomes an CRM tools make the customer-facing functions of business opportunity, or a deal that they’re getting ready to close. easier. They help them: Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be customized, so they can also • Centralize customer information work with records relevant to their team and the way their • Automate marketing interactions organization does business, including sales, customer • Provide business intelligence service, field service, project service, automation, and • Facilitate communications marketing. • Track sales opportunities • Analyze data • Enable responsive customer service Running a successful business is no simple task. When marketing campaigns, data analysis, meetings, customer care, and more, all happen simultaneously, they need a powerful CRM solution to bring all these functions together in one place. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales and Marketing they can keep with the “365 suite” and can seamless integrate all their outlook communications with prospects and clients and their LinkedIn contacts all in one place. Dynamics 365 can also be integrated into Teams, once again practicing what they preach by tying in Teams to everything they do as a company. aka.ms/practiceplaybooks OPERATIONALIZE PAGE 135
Define Customer Support Program & Process
Support Overview
It has been said an unhappy customer When it comes to support, there are two perspectives they represents an opportunity to make a should consider. First, how will they support their customers when they have engaged them for project customer for life. Studies have found when services, are using their software, or are utilizing their a customer gets to the point of intellectual property? Second, where do they go for complaining, they are very emotionally support for a solution they are building or because they need assistance on behalf of their customer? engaged. If they can switch that negative to They will need to: a positive, they may just have a customer • Define their support model for life. • Provision their support infrastructure • Define and implement their escalation process • Select and enable their support options
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Supporting Customers
Let’s begin with the first scenario in which partners support their customers directly. It should go without saying that one of the most important functions for their MSP practice will be supporting their customer once their applications and data are firmly in the cloud or sitting in a hybrid deployment. No matter how well a cloud or hybrid environment is planned, provisioned, operated, or monitored, problems will arise — and those problems will need to be remediated. It’s their job as an MSP to offer support to their customers to deal with outages, breaches, inefficiencies, and disaster scenarios. MSPs need to consider the level of support that makes sense for their practice — in terms of resources and revenue — as well as what makes sense to the customers they serve.
SUPPORT MODEL How do they package and sell their support? The typical options are to provide support either on a retainer basis (where the customer pays a monthly fee for up to a certain number of “use it or lose it” support hours) or per incident (where the customer pays a fee every time they utilize their support). They must also define their support availability so their customers have a realistic expectation of when they can access their service.
ESCALATION PROCESS How does a customer get help at the right technical level? For their support process to make economic sense, avoid having their most skilled and most expensive resources (e.g., architects, senior developers, data scientists, etc.) answer every support call. For their solution offering, consider implementing a tiered support offering of junior-level resources that are equipped to handle common issues. These resources should be equipped to escalate a customer support case to a more senior-level resource once the common issues have been ruled out. They will need to decide how many levels of tiered support to offer, but two to three tiers are most common. When defining their escalation process, do not forget about the basics. For example, how do customers get in touch with them for support in the first place? This could be a dedicated support telephone number, forum or chat room, Twitter handle, email address, etc.
Support infrastructure: How will they manage customer support requests and track them to closure? Many MSPs offer premium support offerings such as a Technical Account Manager who is responsible for tracking, reporting, and escalating an issue.
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Get Co-Sell Ready The Microsoft co-sell program provides Microsoft partners with an opportunity to reach more customers and leverage the Microsoft global brand, sales teams, and distribution networks to sell their apps and services.
Microsoft’s Co-Sell program is the path for partners to Co-Sell opportunity for Teams-based applications. This jointly sell with Microsoft. The Co-Sell program offers a great go-to-market channel for ISV partners incorporates both lead-sharing and direct incentives for building Teams solutions. the Microsoft sales teams for including qualifying partner In addition, Services -Co-Sell is supported across Azure, solutions in their solutions. Business Applications and Microsoft 365, using joint lead- Co-selling is a significant opportunity. Since the program sharing as the basis for co-selling for services partners. was launched in FY17, through to the end of FY19, it has generated over $9.5bn in contracted partner revenue GET CO-SELL READY from over 36,000 co-sell wins. To co-sell with Microsoft, partners need a commercial- ready solution that’s published in the Microsoft CO-SELL FOR TEAMS commercial marketplace, an engaged sales team, a Having started with Azure, for FY20 the Co-Sell program strong go-to-market strategy, and to meet other now includes IP Co-Sell for Teams. This introduces an ISV published requirements. For further information, see Learn more about getting co-sell ready
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Support Options from Microsoft How do partners receive support for their implementation efforts or on behalf of their customer?
For full details of the benefits available at each Partner MICROSOFT SUPPORT level, see Partner Network – Compare Offers. They should also review the Microsoft Partner Benefits Usage Guide. Microsoft Advanced Support for Partners is the ideal solution for partners who are growing their cloud PARTNER ADVISORY HOURS business. Not quite ready for Premier Support, but need a higher level of service than the Microsoft Partner Network Partner advisory hours are used as currency for technical core benefits provide? The Advanced Support program presales and advisory services offered by the Microsoft delivers the right level of support to meet them in the Partner Services team. middle while their business grows. With Advanced As part of Microsoft Partner Network membership, Support for Partners, they get cloud support at an organizations receive partner advisory hours for attaining accessible price point, which helps they be a great ally to a Microsoft competency and subscribing to Microsoft their customers and grow their business faster. The Action Pack. program includes valuable proactive and reactive services delivered by experienced Services Account Managers and Partner Level Advisory Hours Included Partner Technical Consultants. Advanced Support for Partners enables them to provide support on behalf of Network their end customers, in addition to providing support on 0 hours Member subscriptions they own directly. Microsoft Premier Support for Partners delivers a Action Pack 5 hours (after first cloud sale) managed support offering for them and their customers — proactive support services for developing, deploying, and supporting Microsoft technology, whether on- Silver 20 hours premises, hybrid, or in the cloud. As the only partner program with complete, end-to-end managed support Gold 50 hours across the full Microsoft platform, Premier Support for Partners also provides a powerful marketing tool to gain These hours can be used for: competitive advantage in the marketplace. • 1:1 pre-deployment best practice consultation, based Microsoft offers a range of paid Azure support plan on their implementation scenario options for customers — from developers starting their • 1:1 developer consultation for ISVs journey in the cloud to enterprises deploying business- critical, strategic applications on Microsoft Azure. These SIGNATURE CLOUD SUPPORT options are available in tiers – Premier, Professional Direct, Standard and Developer Support Plans — that are Microsoft Signature Cloud Support provides partners with available for purchase directly by those who are not cloud support to help their customers’ services operating Microsoft Partners. In addition to these paid plans, Azure smoothly. SCS handles technical support scenarios for offers core support, which is free. It provides support via Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, forums and help with account billing or management and Microsoft Azure. questions. aka.ms/practiceplaybooks OPERATIONALIZE PAGE 139
SUBMITTING OFFICE 365/TEAMS SUPPORT REQUESTS Support requests need to be submitted using the Admin Portal or Partner Portal (if they’re listed as a partner for their customer). First, they must log in to the customer for which they want to receive support. Next, submit a support request. Once submitted, they can manage the incident from the Office Portal or Partner Portal.
SUPPORT OPTIONS
OPTIONS RESPONSE TIME
Signature Cloud Support Less than 2 hours
Microsoft Advanced Support for Partners Less than 1 hour
PARTNER FACING Microsoft Premier Support for Partners Less than 1 hour
Partner Advisory Hours N/A
Premier Less than 1 hour
Professional-Direct Less than 1 hour
CUSTOMER FACING Standard Less than 2 hours
Developer Less than 8 hours
Core N/A
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Support Tracking Setting up tickets, tracking issue resolution, and managing customer success are fundamentals of their practice.
Providing support to their customers from their practice is • Proactively address issues by detecting a non-trivial, omni-channel effort. Consider using the customers’ intent and social sentiment. Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service solution or a similar customer support software package in their own MAKE THEIR AGENTS' JOBS EASIER business to help them quickly set up and start managing Give their agents complete information — in a single their overall customer support efforts. customer service software app — to make smart decisions Microsoft recommends staying within the “365 Suite” of and provide great service. products and leveraging Microsoft Dynamics 365 for • Reveal customers’ case histories, preferences, and Customer Service to manage customer support activities. feedback. It provides licensed users with access to core customer • Provide guidance on entitlements and service- service capabilities for a significantly lower price than level agreements. comparable offerings from other vendors. These • Display it all in a single interface tailored to their capabilities include enterprise case management, job and skillset. Interactive Service Hub, Unified Service Desk, SLAs and entitlements, and other service group management GET AN ADAPTIVE ENGINE functionality. Respond quickly to customer and market changes within CREATE CONSISTENCY AND LOYALTY an agile, cloud-based environment that has digital intelligence built in. Provide the seamless service their customers expect by meeting them where they are with the information they • Adapt and customize easily using configuration, need, every time. not code. • Extend their functionality through a single • Give customers great service on their channel of interface. choice. • Rely on advanced analytics and a trusted cloud • Make help easy by providing relevant, platform. personalized service.
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Partner Go to Market and Close DealsNetwork Go to Market and Close Deals
Microsoft Teams
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Executive Summary
In previous sections in the playbook, we covered topics But marketing is only half of the story. Their sales team is from how to build their practice by selecting products or the other half. Don’t forget how the two work together services to specialize in, to building and training their and what marketing can do to support sales. The job of team help turn their ideas into reality, to bringing their the marketing team is to build out not only customer special offering to market and finding and keeping great facing materials, but also compelling materials that can customers. So, what’s left to do? In this section, we’ll be used to train and arm their sales team. discover strategies to compel potential customers that The sales end of the bargain is to close the sale. One way may be sitting on the fence to take action, from creating to do this is by writing a winning proposal. Another way a good value proposition to building marketing and is to build a proof of concept or prototype of their sales materials that tell their story. product or service offering, which could help a prospect It has been said that their current customers are their understand what it is they're offering or solidify their best customers. Do they know who their best customers vision of what they can help make possible. Microsoft is are? What do they have in common? And how do they committed to helping their business grow and provides find more like them? We’ll start by helping them build both co-selling and co-marketing opportunities. foundational marketing materials such as marketing Finally, don’t miss the Microsoft resources available in personas, points of differentiation, value propositions, the Go-to-Market and Close Deals guide, which they can and customer business needs. leverage to help build their marketing materials and Once they’ve built the foundation, we’ll look at how they campaigns, as well as resources to help their team close can put these materials to work. We’ll go through the the deal. different ways they can attract new customers and look at best practices. How do they put it all together? We’ll discuss why integrated marketing campaigns work the best, and the tools they need to run them, such as a CRM system and marketing automation.
Top 5 things to do Identify their customer’s business needs Add value turing prospective customers Write a compelling value propostion into lasting ones. These are the top 5 Leverage marketing to find customers things partners should do to go to Build marketing and sales materials market and get deals done. Collaborate with partners
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Marketing Infrastructure After developing an overarching corporate strategy for a Teams practice, marketing must develop an annual marketing plan to support the goals defined by the leadership team. Marketing will then turn strategy into action by operationalizing people and processes. The key tools to consider should include: MARKETING TECHNOLOGY • CRM: As the foundation of their marketing stack, their Their marketing team will need supporting technology to CRM will house the data and business processes execute, analyze and improve their activities across the required to develop, improve, and extend their customer lifecycle. This includes brand awareness, lead prospect and customer relationships. It must be generation and management, prospect engagement and configured to track their marketing attribution to sales nurture, customer acquisition and customer expansion. and provide insights on how campaigns influence sales Marketing must also report outcome metrics and pipeline and customer growth. measure tactical efforts such as campaign performance • Marketing Automation: A single integrated solution and lead sourcing. These responsibilities require the right that automates key marketing processes such as email technologies to be in place, and the right people and marketing, drip and nurture campaigns, lead processes to be deployed to optimize these investments. management and lead scoring. No matter what their practice size, they should consider • Content Management System: Information powers building a well configured marketing technology stack their website, blog and other web properties they can that can scale to their forecasted growth objectives. leverage to market their business online. It allows them to create, publish, store, edit and collaborate on
SURVEY DATA At least 6 in 10 partners generate leads for Teams business via internal sales activities: only half as many use digital marketing or Microsoft channel/field resources.
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website content. If they have a website, they have a Common in-house marketing responsibilities include CMS. strategy, workflow process development, inbound lead • Social Media: Includes technology to accelerate generation and nurturing, including campaign planning, audience growth, monitor activity, make social and data integrations, analytics and tracking. engagement easier, automate content distribution Given the focus of most successful Teams practices, which and measure channel performance. requires specialized knowledge of their customer’s industry • SEO: Helps them drive organic (unpaid) traffic to or niche and its intersection with their technology solution, their website. This category includes many tools that strategy ownership is always an inhouse function. help with keyword research, content analysis, link and citation building, keyword tracking and other The advantages of outsourced resources include: SEO initiatives. • Flexibility: If they are testing a new approach, • Web Analytics Tools: designed to measure digital experimenting with a “one-off” project or need to scale marketing activity, as well as analyze their website quickly to meet a market opportunity, outsourcing and web properties to identify both traffic sources enables them to execute quickly and effectively. and their actions and behaviors in terms of • Cost Efficiency: It can be extremely costly to recruit and engagement and conversion. retain talent for marketing positions that are in demand. Retaining an inhouse resource may not be affordable, INSOURCE OR OUTSOURCE THE MARKETING especially for smaller partner organizations. FUNCTION • Specialized skills: Often there is a lack of expertise or A key operational decision they will need to make regards experience around key marketing activities that require whether to insource or outsource part or all their special skills, such as search engine optimization or marketing functions. It is important to emphasize that video production. Typically, external agencies or there is no right, or wrong model as much depends upon specialists can provide resources with expertise across their organization’s objectives, existing competencies, multiple clients, industries and domains. Consequently, GTM timelines and budget. they often bring many best practices to their team that would not otherwise have been possible. The advantages of in-house resources include: Commonly outsourced Teams practice marketing activities • Business, Industry and Brand Expertise: With daily include website development, graphic design, video immersion into their Teams practice, culture and production, content development (specifically copywriting), values of their organization, this approach helps to as well as marketing automation setup and consultation. ensure accurate and consistent brand messaging SEO is a key capability that may require external assistance across all marketing messaging and deliverables. as SEO mistakes are often very costly. If they outsource this • On-Demand Production: As most Teams practices function, secure a resource that is aware of algorithm are fast paced, with changes in target market drivers changes and knows the evolving best practices and most and customer demands, and frequent changes in current techniques internal business operations, it can be challenging to efficiently and effectively communicate changes in A hybrid approach may possibly be the most effective and positioning and strategy to an outsourced team. impactful in the early days of their Teams practice. They Internal marketers can quickly respond to time- benefit from internal marketing professionals who are sensitive projects, internal priorities and market focused on their marketing outcomes daily, while changes. They can also liaison easily with cross simultaneously leveraging outsourced resources to fill in the functional resources within the business and key gaps by bringing specialized skills to activities that are customers activities that require constant monitoring periodically required, but without the need for a full-time and fluency (email marketing and nurture campaigns) investment. it is almost always more cost effective to assign these tasks to dedicated inhouse resources. aka.ms/practiceplaybooks GO TO MARKET & CLOSE DEALS PAGE 145
Sales Infrastructure After developing an overarching corporate strategy for a Teams practice, sales must develop a strategic sales plan to support the goals defined by the leadership team. The strategic sales plan describes the target market business environment, opportunities, strategic priorities, revenue goals, sales team structure, budget and action plan.
SALES TECHNOLOGY their prospects. Unfortunately, this initial burst of energy Customer Relationship Management (CRM): is often undermined by a disorganized onboarding Configuring and implementing a CRM system that reflects process. It is critical that they put as much structure and the core elements of their target prospect profile is critical energy into onboarding new sales employees as they do to understanding buyer behavior, effectively facilitating into sourcing and interviewing them. deal reviews, coaching sales team members and delivering an accurate forecast. At minimum the CRM system must STRUCTURE AN EFFECTIVE ONBOARDING support the collection of information regarding prospect PROCESS and opportunity requirements, key stakeholders, project drivers, the selection process, key milestones, decision Sales professionals will be exposed to a substantial criteria, competitors and close dates. The CRM must also amount of new content during their onboarding cycle. To support the execution of their defined Accelerated, Depth, ensure this information is absorbed, hiring managers must Disruptive and Existing Customer sales motions. consistently evaluate new sales hires to determine if they fully understand and can demonstrate the skills they need Social Selling: Equipping their sales team with a social to succeed in role. selling “stack” is critical to driving impact, efficiency and prospect engagement. The minimum stack should include To reduce the risk of losing a new employee during the LinkedIn Navigator https://www.linkedin.com a social onboarding process (or not identifying a hiring mistake scheduling tool like Hootsuite https://hootsuite.com/, early), managers should: social listening tools and personality profiling tools like 1. Clearly communicate the company vision Crystal Knows www.crystalknows.com. 2. Align organizational and employee objectives Industry Content Services: Providing their sales team 3. Set clear expectation and objectives with access to industry content, insights, trends, and news 4. Ensure pre-onboard housekeeping is complete events ensures they can facilitate domain specific 5. Design a comprehensive onboarding roadmap conversations with prospects and customers. with defined activities for key timeline milestones: o first day Subscriptions to industry tools like First Research o first week www.firstresearch.com, D&B Hoovers o first month http://www.hoovers.com, and Industry Intelligence o 90-day confirmation www.industryintel.com help their sales professionals 6. Structure an experiential learning process remain relevant and informed. 7. Continuously evaluate, coach & confirm NEW HIRE ONBOARDING 8. Make a clear retain or replace decision at the end of the 90-day probation period A well-designed onboarding process harnesses the excitement, enthusiasm and desire to make an immediate impact that all sales professionals bring to a new job. They are motivated to ‘hit the ground running’, open to learning new sales strategies, and eager to engage with aka.ms/practiceplaybooks GO TO MARKET & CLOSE DEALS PAGE 146
SALES METHODOLOGY an ongoing basis to ensure they accurately reflect the business environment and realities of their target market. Create Repeatable Processes It’s also important to ensure that sellers and customers Cloud technology buying processes are increasingly clearly understand their differentiated services, such as leaving sales professionals with fewer and fewer prospect change management or managed services, that accelerate engagement opportunities. Every interaction counts. value realization and reduce project risk. Every prospect communication must have a purpose and sales processes must be optimized to drive consistent SALES OPERATIONS outcomes. The Teams-centric solution they bring to market will effectively dictate whether the sales team Management Rhythm: Sales leadership must schedule drives a three phase Accelerated process, a four phase and facilitate consistent opportunity/deal, pipeline and Depth approach or a five phase Disruptive strategy. If forecast reviews. This disciplined rhythm drives sales they pursue multiple buying profiles within their focus process compliance, active coaching and forecast industry or vertical (SMB repeatable and ISV mid-market) accuracy. their sales team will have to define and drive two separate Proposal Management: All estimates, proposals, NDAs, opportunity pursuit streams. They also will have to define and contracts need to be vetted by the appropriate a wave-based Customer sales motion to drive activation leadership team members prior to release to prospects or and consumption of both existing and new cloud, project customers. and managed services (up/cross-sell). Compensation and Incentives: The cloud, SaaS and a Repeatable Sales Assets: Preconfiguring industry or focus on monthly recurring revenue have effectively vertical specific sales assets drives sales process rendered most traditional compensation models obsolete. compliance, improved message consistency, increased Licensing revenue, which was historically collected upon deal velocity and accelerated prospect engagement. It contract execution and used to fund sales and marketing also forces their organization to clearly define and costs, is now recognized over a much longer period. Time validate critical project drivers, business case elements and and materials project services are increasingly being key milestones. Core repeatable sales assets include: replaced with 3rd-party and partner-developed IP or being • Engagement communication (e/v-mails) converted into recurring monthly fees. • Alignment plan Simultaneously, customer demand is shifting towards • Engagement plan solution sets that include multiple Microsoft and partner • Credentialing meeting agenda developed components (ERP, CRM, ISV, Office365, Power • Demonstration Plan BI, SharePoint, Azure, managed services, IP, etc.). • Selection service proposal Combined, these changes are driving the need for new • Optimization workshop summary report compensation models. Sales operations is responsible for • Proposal presentation designing balanced sales compensation plans that attract • Solution proposal skilled talent, incent the right behaviors and mitigate These repeatable sales assets, which underpin all three overall business risk. cloud sales motions, need to be updated and enhanced in
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Go-to-Market and Close Deals Guide Leverage the Microsoft resources available in the Go-to-Market and Close Deals guide, for details on marketing to the cloud buyer, aligning marketing goals with business goals, developing value propositions, and marketing and sales assets, resources, and best practices.
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Partner Optimize & Grow Network Optimize and Grow
Microsoft Teams
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Executive Summary Partners are now familiar with strategies for marketing, and how to grow and improve their lead generation practice through a well-planned referral building Teams practices, finding and marketing program. We’ll show them how to make the keeping customers, and providing them most of their renewal process, and how to get ahead of with ongoing support. deadlines. We will help them learn how to grow their business by In this section, we’ll focus on how to optimize their identifying the best customer personas and creating practice, strengthen their relationship with customers, and “look-alike” prospects, deepening their expertise in key evaluate their performance to help them continue to verticals and marketing that expertise, and collaborating delight prospects and customers. with other partners to offer their customers a more comprehensive level of service and support. Are their customers delighted by their services and products? Delighted and not just satisfied? In this section, We will end by discussing how important it is to create they’ll learn why customer lifetime value is so important, advocates for their company. This includes turning a and how to create more customers for life. We’ll share customer into a fan and collecting testimonials to create how to get to know their customers better by following case studies that can be used in future marketing their journey with secret shopping and analysis. We’ll also campaigns. Map their customer’s experience and ask for explore the use of a “land and expand” strategy and see feedback to ensure they are turning satisfied customers how getting to know their customers better can lead to into delighted customers who can wait to tell their story! incremental opportunities to provide additional services. Use the strategies we provide in the Optimize and Grow They will also discover ways they can keep their solutions guide to optimize and grow their practice. top of mind for prospects and customers through nurture
Top 5 things to do Gather feedback from their customers Learn from customers and experience to Nurture existing customers optimize and expand to new markets Turn customers into advocates through strategic partnerships. These are Generate referrals with marketing the top 5 things partners should do to optimize and grow a Teams practice. Nurture strategic partnerships
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Guide: Optimize and Grow Leverage the Microsoft resources available in the Optimize and Grow guide, for details on building customer lifetime value, executing nurture marketing efforts, optimizing and growing from feedback, refining customer value proposition, growing partnerships, and measuring results.
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Playbook Summary This playbook was created to help partners gain valuable knowledge on how to build a successful Teams practice.
In the first chapter, Define Your Strategy, partners learned about the unique business opportunity in front of them. The four main practice focus areas were defined: deployment, security and governance; adoption and change management; calling, meetings and devices; and developing custom and ISV solutions. And, the main monetization models for Teams services were explained: project-based services, on-going managed services, and licensing re-usable IP. The Hire & Train section, explains skill requirements that a partner organization would need to deliver Teams projects and services. , Guidance was given on how to evaluate new hires or up-skill existing staff to meet those needs, and several training resources are available, both online and instructor-led. The Operationalize section shows partners can roll out Teams offerings. This included their approach to marketing and sales and using Teamwork Assessments as a first stage of a customer engagement. This section included discussion of a range of tools they can use to help them generate more leads and manage their Teams practice more efficiently. The Go-to-Market and Close Deals section offers guidance on developing a marketing plan, best practices for operationalizing marketing staff and processes, as well as access to the Go-To-Market and Close Deals Guide. Finally, in Optimize and Grow, we referenced the Optimize and Grow guide, which includes a wide range of proven approaches to build and scale a successful Microsoft Partner practice.
FEEDBACK Partners are encouraged to share feedback on how toa improve this and other playbooks by emailing [email protected].
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